Translation and Postnational Cartographies of Language in Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literatures

“Une opération de traduction ne peut être effectuée que s’il y a une frontière à franchir,” says Sherry Simon in Le trafic des langues. The border that translation is said to cross is, typically, linguistic: the dominant understanding and theorization of translation relies on the notion of linguistic difference and autonomy, whereby meaning is transferred from one bounded linguistic system to the other. This dissertation takes as its starting point the border between languages, recognizing that linguistic borders as we know them today are neither natural nor ontological, but the result of the sedimentation and naturalization of a specific kind of linguistic mapping along discriminatory (ethno)national and racial lines. Its premise is that the gesture of translation, rather than simply crossing a pre-existing linguistic border, constructs linguistic difference by drawing a border where there is not one in the first place. The writers that make up my corpus— Gregory Scofield, France Daigle, Kevin Lambert, Joshua Whitehead, Nathanaël, Oana Avasilichioaei, Maude Veilleux and Nicholas Dawson—reveal the work of linguistic differentiation (and, consequently, of translation) as normative, hierarchical, and violent, inasmuch as it imposes a linguistic order on texts that explicitly refuse to conform to that order. This dissertation problematizes the structural view of language that underlies the bulk of Western translation practice and theory by looking at the anticolonial, queer, and postnational linguistic cartographies that are drawn and imagined in contemporary literary works published in Canada between 2005 and 2020, and written by voices that are minoritized within Canada’s linguistic regime. These texts are written in what we are used to recognizing as several “languages,” “registers” or “dialects,” in other words they feature linguistic forms that overflow the containers of French and English, the two official, colonial languages of the Canadian state. I argue that, on the part of these writers, this amounts to a refusal to be a good, monolingually intelligible national subject, and that it is crucial for translation to reenact that refusal. Indeed, because these texts ask us to approach, read and translate them without following the lines drawn on colonial and national linguistic maps, they point to what I call a postlingual understanding of translation, which enables a move away from idealized, abstract, national languages and towards the specificity of linguistic practices, understood as fundamentally social and local. Taking cues from the literary works under study, my analysis calls for a focus on the singularity of the relation both between the translator and the text she is translating and between the translator and the linguistic, communicative and expressive resources that are socially meaningful in her own surroundings. Framed as a series of relations, rather than as transposition from one system to another, translation becomes a decidedly localized practice that draws on the translator’s specific embodied and territorialized experience and on the subjective, deliberate and ethical relations she establishes in the process.

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