Written in 1995 for the Joyce Marshall anthology, Blood and Bone / En chair et en os
Discovering Friendship
Joyce Marshall and I first met on a train. It was in 1974 and we were travelling to Stanley House at Richmond on the Gaspé Peninsula to take part in a conference of literary translators sponsored by the Canada Council. This was the gathering that led to the founding of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators Association of Canada.
All of us who met on that train were meeting for the first time, except that some of us already knew Philip Stratford, the catalyst and principal organizer of the gathering. It was a long trip, a full twenty-four hours, and trains still had dining cars and club cars, so there was much shuttling back and forth and considerable opportunity for convivial exchange before the serious business began at our destination. When I met Joyce I knew that she had already translated several books and was currently translating Gabrielle Roy, and was also a recognized and respected author in her own right. I, with my own slim credentials, was in awe.
I was much taken, however, by her interest in others and quiet but keen sense of humour. She accurately perceived in me an excessive do-gooding tendency toward total strangers and for the rest of the trip was keeping me out of trouble, which provided a good many chuckles. By the time we got off that train, I had discovered that she and I had similar thoughts about a lot of things.
I don't think anyone will disagree when I say that the revelation for all of us at Stanley House was that the tales of woe each of us had to tell, thinking they were unique, turned out, with slight variations, to be everyone else's tales of woe as well. The group decided that if ever literary translators were to have some consideration in the book industry, control of our own work, and a little respect, we must have an association. That association was born a year later, on May 17, 1975.
Looking back from these mid 1990s, the Association's primary goals in the mid 1970s look pretty rudimentary, but then, literary translators were working under rudimentary conditions. We were, of course, immeasurably fortunate in having the Canada Council's encouragement and newly-established grant system, but in all other respects we were dirt under everyone's feet. It was common practice not only to ignore a book's translator completely in reviews, publicity, catalogues, lists and bibliographies, but to omit credit to the translator even on the title page of a book and in anthologies.
Joyce played a leading and effective part in monitoring such practices, writing letters to alert those responsible, and in every available way raising awareness in the book industry and in the public that translators should be given proper recognition in association with their work. As a vice-president of the Association, she travelled from Toronto to all the Montreal meetings without missing one for years, and brought to them the benefit of her broad experience and unerring wisdom. She always stayed at my house when she came to Montreal and I stayed with her when I went to Toronto, so we did a lot of talking, mostly about translation.
Another sore point for the Association was the editing of translations. Editors routinely did whatever they wanted with translations, riding roughshod over the objections of translators who had worked hard to be accurate and at the same time make their texts readable. Joyce, with the credibility she had earned in the milieu, once again spearheaded the drive to educate publishers and their editors. This was a tougher nut. Certain publishers who shall be nameless had decided that there was an intrinsic and necessary opposition between fidelity and readability; a faithful translation was per se unreadable, we were told, and translators were so wedded to fidelity that only editors, bilingual or not, could be allowed to make final decisions. Added to this, it was not uncommon for authors with inflated notions of their own second-language proficiency to try to impose lexical and syntactical horrors on translations of their work.
It was perhaps especially our joint efforts in the wars over editing that drew Joyce and I together in friendship. Beyond the campaign we waged together on behalf of the Association, she came to my defense in one case in point, and on one occasion was my editor. I lost no opportunity to listen and learn from her, and for all I learned will forever be deeply grateful. But I also knew the value of her friendship through a period of great personal trial for me, outside the translation context, when her sensitivity and loyal support were unfailingly generous and sustaining. This is an indelible memory in my affection for her.
What has emerged consistently from my associations with Joyce, and what I hope has rubbed off on me, is her writer's approach to translation. The English language to her is a treasure to be celebrated and never abused; in her translation as in her writing, passable is not good enough.
My wish is that all readers of this collection may come away with some special, personal enrichment, a taste of the enrichment I have known.
Patricia Claxton,
Montreal, March 1995
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