Plays in Scots by Michel Tremblay (review)

Reviewed by: Plays in Scots by Michel Tremblay Rachel Killick Plays in Scots. By Michel Tremblay. Trans. by Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay. Ed. by Martin Bowman. 2 vols. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow. 2023. xvi+296 pp. (vol. i); xviii+269 pp. (vol. ii). £19.95 (each). ISBN 978–1–906841–52–2 (vol. i); 978–1–906841– 53–9 (vol. ii). Theatre has provided a crucial public space for the affirmation of the distinctive identity of Québec as a modern francophone nation within the Canadian Federation, profiling its unique linguistic and cultural specificity to its audience at home and simultaneously highlighting Québécois difference vis-à-vis the language and culture of its former colonial masters, France and Great Britain. Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-Sœurs (1968), couched provocatively in 'joual', the raw vernacular of Montreal's francophone working class, catapulted onto the stage—to the scandalized dismay of their bourgeois counterparts—the cultural and economic deprivation and disadvantage of the Québécois community overall. Ten years later Martin Bowman, a francophile Scots-Canadian Quebecker, and Bill Findlay, a Scot from Fife, recognizing the resonances for Scotland of Tremblay's Québécois theatre, embarked on a lengthy translation partnership, garnering all-round acclaim for Tremblay as 'the best playwright Scotland never had' (Mark Fisher, The Guardian, 29 October 1992, quoted ii, 9). Bowman, assembling their translations of eight Tremblay plays (only three previously published), undertakes the formidable editorial task of establishing definitive texts from the changing manuscript versions, pre- and post-dating theatrical productions in Scotland, the UK, and anglophone North America between 1978 and 2012. The co-translators' governing principle was to resist adaptation; to present Québécois characters and settings within the soundscape of demotic Scots; and to extend the profile of Scots as a valid theatrical language, not just for Scottish plays, but also for modern foreign theatres in translation. On the page (e.g. 'Whit's gaun oan?', i, 37), the Scots translations are initially disconcerting. So too were Tremblay's texts to his francophone readers, though he stressed from the start that his informal 'phonetic' transcriptions of 'joual' were not intended for silent perusal, but were there to make plain the demotic mode in which his plays were to be performed. Bowman and Findlay's informal transcriptions of Scots are likewise geared to speaking and theatrical performance. Enabling the plays to be fully appreciated by a foreign audience, Bowman's informative introductions to each volume and each play are his second considerable editorial contribution. Drawing on contemporary letters and diary entries, these essays allow direct access to the translators' shared evaluations of the thematic content, socio-cultural contexts, and translational challenges of the different texts; their interactive modes of literal and specialized translation; the excitement of theatrical workshopping; the joyous relief of positive critical and public reception. The arrangement of the plays tracks the development of Tremblay's theatre from [End Page 397] the thematic and linguistic harshness of societal and familial recrimination in the 1970s (volume i: The Guid Sisters (Les Belles-Sœurs); The Real Wurld? (Le Vrai Monde?); Hosanna (Hosanna); Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (A toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou)) to the gentler tonalities of nostalgia and self-reflection of the 1990s (volume ii: The House among the Stars (La Maison suspendue); Albertine, in Five Times (Albertine, en cinq temps); Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer (Messe solennelle pour une pleine lune d'été); If only… (Encore une fois, si vous permettez…)). The emphatic social realism of the earlier plays, omnipresent in the linguistic and cultural particularities of 'joual', finds admirable re-expression in the translators' alert deployment of the speech patterns and vocabulary of demotic Scots, including lexical items used only in Scotland (e.g. 'to greet'='to cry') but also broader cultural usages, general to the British Isles, such as sexual or scatological swearing in lieu of the sacrilegious oaths of Catholic Québec. Meanwhile, significant information on the Montreal setting is achieved by light-touch additions such as 'that fleapit, the Amherst' (i, 39), neatly pinpointing Amherst Street...

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