Several months ago, I was asked whether I would be interested in sharing thoughts on my experience as a mentee for the Karin Montin Literary Translation Mentorship (KMLT), a mentorship program that had been newly created by the Literary Translators Association of Canada (ATTLC/LTAC) in collaboration with the Quebec Writers Federation (QWF). I felt prepared to respond to this question with an unequivocal and affirmative “Yes.” This “Yes” was, of course, an assertion, an affirmation carrying the weight of an experience that I believe owed itself, and still owes itself, in large part to the mentorship program and the mentor with whom I was paired. On another level, this “Yes” was a way for me to pledge myself to the future and to the task of writing – and thus, I am writing at last, to say something, perhaps anything, about my experience. I say “anything” emphatically, because I could return a thousand times and more to the experience in question, whence my inclination to underscore that it cannot simply be synchronized, pinned down, dated – bref, codified into some chronology, from beginning to end, contained neatly in the past like a date on a calendar. And so, I decided to format this reflection by providing a few remarks on my experience as a mentee, circumstances permitting, and a sample of writing taken from a broader series of ruminations, reflections, and meditations on the translation process that I had put together over the course of the Mentorship itself.
I submitted my application and translation pitch to the KMLT in October, 2021. I was doubtful that my application would garner a response, and I am sure a great many aspiring translators, writers, artists, and young people in search of work, mentorship, and doorways into the world of the arts, may feel the grip of similar doubts. The arts suffers from a lack of resources, support, subsidizing, funding, and collective care that is in no small part due to a general trend in cultural and economic neoliberalization. Intensified competition and the scarcity of material supports and opportunities, whether in the arts or on the job market, have reached such heights that silence and doubt have quietly established themselves as a normative expectation in the social psyche, self-naturalizing as a general tone of the times. What perhaps compounded this mood of despair and sense of being a dice roll in a struggle against the odds, was the fact that I had chosen to pitch, from among all the literary genres of one’s choosing, a book of theory and experimental philosophy: La généalogie du déracinement: enquête sur l’habitation postcoloniale, authored by Dalie Giroux, a visionary Quebecois political philosopher and public intellectual. The task of doing justice to this work in summary is impossible – but if I were to provide a few descriptive remarks, I would say that it explores the contours of a collective imaginary and ways of living that render our relations to the Earth unintelligible, thereby producing an uninhabitable Earth. This Earthly uninhabitability is tied to the widespread rule of intellectual regimes of abstraction (state, value, capital, globalization, etc.,) organized around the production of value, which impinge on the material landscape. At the same time as it is an exploration or inquiry into hegemonic ways of living in North America, I would say it is also an exercise in what Derek R. Ford calls “fostering a collective imaginary beyond capital.” Its assessment of contemporary ways of living in North America in relation to global technocapitalism and the production of landscapes operates both as an elucidation of the historical present and as a kind of opening onto pathways towards liberating political futures. Anyhow, I had my doubts about receiving a response, and I had even more doubt about my chances of being shortlisted, let alone being offered the mentorship.
When I eventually did get a response, it was a response that – having in its nature broken the silence expected and dispelled doubt – I had not anticipated, but for new and separate reasons. The QWF wrote to inform me that I was among the top three finalists, but that I did not receive the mentorship. This was not, however, the crux of the surprise. Instead, what surprised me about the letter that I received was the sound of its heartbeat. I was informed that the translation mentor, Jessica Moore, made a request to obtain my contact information. In reply, I gave my permission to the QWF to pass my information onto her. Within a few weeks’ time, Jessica and I were exchanging emails. The fact that Jessica went out of her way to contact me and encourage me to pursue the translation project independently was already a sure sign that the official recipient of the mentorship was a very fortunate person. There are surely many facets that make a mentorship what it is, but at its foundation it is a relationship between people. And so, the sociability, encouragement, care, and enthusiasm that formed my first impressions of Jessica were indicative of a mentor who was passionate about and committed to the nature of their work. Our correspondence over emails culminated in a meeting over the phone, during which she generously shared her time, guidance, perspective, and thoughts. All of this transpired prior to the actual start date of the mentorship program between her and the recipient that had already been chosen. The decision on the part of the recipient to step down was the critical relational shift that would alter the course of our trajectories. Following that decision, the executive director of the Quebec Writers Federation contacted me to share the unexpected news and offered the mentorship program to me. I gladly accepted it.
My experience of the mentorship was so abundant, creative, and positively overwhelming that it spilled over into a photo-essay and sowed the seeds for ideas that I later developed and incorporated into a lecture on translation and linguistic materialism, which I gave to students enrolled in a fourth-year Contemporary Studies course at the University of King’s College in September, 2022. The combination of creative reflection and writing, assembling a philosophical term base, discussing the text, step-by-step editing and revising, patient and careful reading, applying the text to everyday life, exercises in meditation, and many other practices and approaches that were established throughout our mentor-mentee relationship as part of a translation process guided me towards unseen and previously unknown personal potentials for human creativity. The convictions that I previously held about the reciprocal bond between a flourishing creative spirit and the depth of a person’s humanity were restrengthened by this experience in such a way that the importance of mentorship programs is all the more clearly immeasurable. At least, these words are a personal testament to how profound of an impact the mentorship had on me, and the inheritance of which I continue to carry forward into new horizons. We need mentorships and we need them to multiply. With that said, I will close these last remarks with a small reflection on translation that I had written, among many others, over the course of my time as a mentee:
Bound to the radically contingent and irreducible alterity of languages, I am incapable, when translating, of a smooth reading. I am steeped in the microscopic and I feel inescapably compelled to read the French text line by line, each line again and again, to the point of sliding ever deeper into a space of solitude and disquiet with the French words. There is a sense of the eerie that takes hold, as though I reside in the pupil of an immutable, hidden, silent, and unknowable glance. Have I arrived at the threshold where the linearity of the phonetic alphabet, once described by Marshall McLuhan as the hot medium of typography for its abstract visual intensity, metamorphosizes into the ambiguous linings of language? Here, my assumed position as Reader further vacillates between Writer, Linguist and Artisan, caught in the restrictions, circumstances, syntaxes, letters, and boundaries of my own language. Reading a line over, and over again, in continuity with its flowerings in a new form, slipping into an atelier of experimentation and creation, in pursuit of a repetition worthy of eternal recurrence. I am somewhere between a junkyard, a workshop, an etymology, a dictionary, an archive, a discussion, a library, an office. Translation spreads a web of language, erects a variable and chaotic epistemological grid – an ever-widening clutter of notes and documents, new windows and tabs, an unfurling scroll of mobile texts and notes to self, post-its, colour-coding, underlining, momentary insights and reflections scrawled on the backs of opened envelopes. It has become unshakably clear to me that the placement of each letter, just as much as each and every word or comma, fastens and holds together the delicate structure of the text – that the materiality of each sign together creates an order of the possible and impossible. The feeling that you get when you believe that you may have determined the “right” placement, or the pleasurable experience of finding an order of words that feels “certain,” might be comparable to a kind of religious ecstasy. When what you are translating inhabits you and imbues your world, it can feel as indisputably true as some Sacred revelation. But, as Borges once wrote of the nature of a philosophical doctrine, it is “in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chapter – if not a paragraph or a noun – in the history of philosophy.” On some level, translation is a striving to make such experiences of truth relivable.
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Alex Boos lives and works in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, located within Treaty #3 and the Traditional Territory of the Ojibway of Lac Seul First Nation. He holds a B.A. Combined Honours degree in French and Contemporary Studies from the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University and an M.A. in Translation Studies from Concordia University. He is a freelance researcher and French-English translator, and a co-founder and co-host of the podcast Unsettling (formerly known as The Poplar Tapes), a podcast on history, culture, and politics striving after anti-capitalist and decolonial futures in the settler colonies. https://unsettling.podbean.com/