LETTER FROM MONTREAL
“Go ahead, put some slang in it, put some Quebecois or Creole in it, mix all your languages and your origins and if you don’t know English, invent your words!” », launches the host to a dozen people seated in front of antique typewriters. Gathered in a theater in Montreal, they have just drawn a few lines from novels by Jack Kerouac, On the Road or Doctor Sax, written in English, and are invited to deliver their own translation. Timidly at first, some end up taking the plunge and daring to place “taboo”Quebec exclamation, or “spotting the bird” (Anglicism meaning to observe) in their final version.
This funny exercise was imagined by the author, playwright and translator in his spare time, Jean-Marc Dalpé. Coming from the French-speaking minority of Ontario, an English-speaking Canadian province, and as such “having the English-French stereo between the two ears”he was irritated for a long time by the French translation (that of Gallimard not to quote it) of the most famous work of Kerouac, On the road. “When reading, I did not smell the smell of asphalthe says, and then write “car”, Parisian slang, to talk about an old Chevrolet, that doesn’t appeal to me at all! This Frenchman from France, smooth and polite, understands nothing about what America is. »
On the occasion of the centenary of the writer’s birth, Jean-Marc Dalpé has therefore imagined a multidisciplinary and evolving performance to plunge into the Kerouaquian universe. Title 100 years on the go (“à fond”), currently on tour across Canada, he mixes cabaret evenings, short films, exhibitions or even translation exercises carried out by visitors. “My dream is to see French-speaking America say to itself: ‘Kerouac is my cousin.’ I want to give him the desire to reclaim his author. »
A life spent defining himself as a “canuck”
The French Canadians, this French-speaking minority resulting from the first arrivals from the other side of the Atlantic from the XVIe century, now claim as one of their own the wanderer Kerouac, long considered the iconic American writer of the Beat Generation, 100% Yankee and whiskey. Not only is “Ti Jean”, as he signed all his letters, the most illustrious descendant of Quebecers settled in the United States, they claim, not only has he spent his life defining himself as a “canuck” (Canadian) rather than American, but, better still, his literary work owes much to the French language. Like Samuel Beckett or Vladimir Nabokov, recognized as bilingual authors, English-French for one, Russian-English for the other, it is time, according to them, to give Jack Kerouac back his full identity: that of a writer torn between two geographies, and whose linguistic insecurity – “I never had a language of my own”he admitted – nourished the work.
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2023-05-03 23:24:24
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