At Partisan Magazine Carmine Starnino Argues: 'Québécois poetry barely registers'

Considering all of the hoops that Signal Editions (an imprint of Montreal’s Véhicule Press) goes through, you would think that readers might pay attention. However, according to the imprint's editor, Carmine Starnino, Canadian readers are not attentive to the collective's sagacious efforts to translate French-language poetry into English and to distribute the results to the rest of Canada. From Partisan Magazine:

I edit the Signal Editions poetry imprint for Montreal’s Véhicule Press, and a few weeks ago I signed up a new title, an English translation of Pierre Nepveu’s upcoming collection, La Dureté des Matières et de L’eau.

Translations have been part of the Signal mandate from our very start in 1985. The list includes mainstays such as Robert Melançon, Pierre Morency, Michel Garneau, and Yves Boisvert. As a Montreal press, we feel that it’s our duty to circulate to the rest of Canada the best French-language verse in the province. And Nepveu is one of the most significant Québécois poets now writing. A member of both the Order of Canada and of L'Academie des lettres du Quebec, the 69-year-old was given the Prix Athanase-David in 2005 (a lifetime achievement award) and has won three Governor General’s Awards for his work in French (two for poetry). His music is marked by an ecstatic freshness that breathes so cleanly through its cadences each word seems to have had the dust beaten out of it. In now-classic collections like Lignes Aériennes and Les Verbes Majeurs, he offers language that sounds like speech but crests with scriptural power. This is borne out in extended narratives—Nepveu likes to knit short poems into long sequences—that are fast-moving and fluently incantatory with symphonic surges of phrasing. He is a master of the perfect opening, of lines that seem electric and inevitable (“rien ne tient lieu de retour, / tout est étrange comme si c'était hier”). Craft aside, an almost primal awe for mortality holds together his most memorable passages (“Les verbes majeurs nous obsèdent,” he writes, “naître, grandir, aimer, / penser, croire, mourir”). At his best, he belongs in the company of masters like Gaston Miron. And he’s as good as anyone English Canada has produced.

So why does the prospect of publishing a new collection by him plunge me into despair? Because I already know what to expect when the book is finally released: what UK poet and translator Michael Hofmann has called “a deluge—a deluge of nothing.”

Reviewers will ignore it, bookstores won’t stock it, and, since no one will know about it or be able to find it, hardly anyone will read it. All this, despite the translation being provided by Donald Winkler, one of our most gifted and highly decorated practitioners (The Major Verbs, his version of Nepveu’s Les Verbes Majeurs, won a Governor General’s Award). Pasha Malla’s recent online essay for The New Yorker on the “estrangement” of Québécois literature—written, in part, to help ignite a “Bolaño-like breakthrough” for Raymond Bock’s novel Atavismes: Histoire—didn’t go into nearly enough detail about the labour editors like me undergo in trying to win French-language poetry the attention it deserves. In the 15 years I’ve edited Signal, the Québécois poets we’ve translated have never been invited to a literary festival in, say, Vancouver or profiled by the Globe and Mail or interviewed by the CBC’ s Eleanor Wachtel. In fact, they’ve scarcely been covered by any aspect of the Anglophone media outside of the province. (Most are perfectly fluent in English and almost all keep close tabs on our literary scene; Nepveu and Melançon have written extensively on Canadian poets.) [...]

Continue at Partisan Magazine.