“Montreal’s history”, recalls Sherry Simon, “has been dominated by the spectre of separateness, and defined by efforts to respect or transgress the boundary between anglophone West and francophone East” (p. 4). Though this duality was central in shaping the life and history of the city, it has somewhat eroded, giving way to different partitions and a new sense of cosmopolitism. How to account for this gradual shift? How and why were contact zones created and who were the agents of these contacts? Above all, what does the history of the “divided city” tell us about the conditions of translatability and the role of translation in shaping cultural identities? These are the questions raised in Sherry Simon’s latest monograph. Rejecting once and for all the model of translation as a search for equivalence, the author remains faithful to the post-structuralist position she has adopted from her earliest writings, pushing the relation between linguistic translation, social interaction and displacement to its extreme.

References

Appiah, Kwame Anthony

1993 “Thick Translation”. Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London/New York: Routledge 1993 417–429.

Caplan, Usher

1982 Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A. M. Klein. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

Cronin, Michael

2003 Translation and Globalization. London/New York: Routledge.

Geertz, Clifford

1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana Press.

Klein, A.M.

1994 Notebooks: Selections from the A.M. Klein Papers. Zailig Pollock & Usher Caplan, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Simon, Sherr

1989 L’inscription sociale de la traduction au Québec. Québec: Office de la langue française.

Simon, Sherry

1994 Le trafic des langues: traduction et culture dans la littérature québécoise. Montréal: Boréal.

Simon, Sherry

1996 Gender in translation: cultural identity and the politics of transmision. London/New York: Routledge.  

Simon, Sherry

1999 Hybridité culturelle. Montréal: île de la tortue.