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The following excerpt is from Michael Enright’s tribute to Sheila Fischman – “the doyenne of Canadian translators” – in yesterday’s The Sunday Edition.
Translation is much more than finding one word to replace another of a different language.
It is, in many ways, as much an art as the act of writing itself.
In 1999, Ms. Fischman was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Ottawa. In her acceptance speech, she said;”Translating takes you deep inside the text, the language, the culture, the mind of the writer. It is a thrilling place to be but it can sometimes be dangerous also.” Dangerous of course, if you get the tone and texture wrong.
Her aim is to get inside the characters and give them what she calls a second life.
But a friend says that she wants to draw “a cloak of invisibility around her presence in the text.”
In the same Ottawa speech, Ms. Fischman said; “I believe that to make a successful translation you must choose books that speak to you, for which you feel an affinity, emotional as well as stylistic. Indeed without the emotional affinity, it is impossible, for me anyway, to render the style.”
When thinking about Ms. Fischman, you have to wonder if there is not a great writer lurking behind the veil of translation.
In his contribution to her honour book (In Translation: Honouring Sheila Fischman, edited by Sherry Simon), Roch Carrier writes: ” I cannot stop thinking of all the books Sheila might have written, had she not devoted her life to translation.”
But what might have been detracts not an iota from what is. May she long continue to deeply probe the musical blue waters of language and uncover the treasures therein.
In Translation celebrates Fischman’s more than 150 book-length translations from French to English. It combines essays on the friendships created through translation with essays on the art of translation and on the changing context of literary translation in Canada. A fitting tribute to an outstanding career, In Translation illuminates the artistry behind a difficult craft by considering the work of one of its finest practitioners.
To learn more about In Translation, or to order online, click here.
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