Translation and Postnational Cartographies of Language in Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literatures by Arianne Des Rochers A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto © Copyright by Arianne Des Rochers 2021 ii Translation and Postnational Cartographies of Language in Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literatures Arianne Des Rochers Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto 2021 Abstract “Une opération de traduction ne peut être effectuée que s’il y a une frontière à franchir,” says Sherry Simon in Le trafic des langues. The border that translation is said to cross is, typically, linguistic: the dominant understanding and theorization of translation relies on the notion of linguistic difference and autonomy, whereby meaning is transferred from one bounded linguistic system to the other. This dissertation takes as its starting point the border between languages, recognizing that linguistic borders as we know them today are neither natural nor ontological, but the result of the sedimentation and naturalization of a specific kind of linguistic mapping along discriminatory (ethno)national and racial lines. Its premise is that the gesture of translation, rather than simply crossing a pre-existing linguistic border, constructs linguistic difference by drawing a border where there is not one in the first place. iii This dissertation thus problematizes the structural view of language that underlies the bulk of Western translation practice and theory by looking at the anticolonial, queer, and postnational linguistic cartographies that are drawn and imagined in contemporary literary works published in Canada between 2005 and 2020, and written by voices that are minoritized within Canada’s linguistic regime. These texts are written in what we are used to recognizing as several “languages,” “registers” or “dialects,” in other words they feature linguistic forms that overflow the containers of French and English, the two official, colonial languages of the Canadian state. I argue that this amounts to a refusal to be a good, monolingually intelligible national subject, and that translation must reenact that refusal. Consequently, these texts point to what I call a postlingual understanding of translation, which enables a move away from idealized, abstract, national languages and towards the specificity of linguistic practices, understood as fundamentally social, local and embodied. Framed as a series of relations, rather than as transposition from one linguistic system to another, translation becomes a decidedly localized practice that draws on the translator’s specific embodied and territorialized experience and on the subjective, deliberate and ethical relations she establishes in the process. iv Acknowledgments I thank the Government of Québec’s Fonds de recherche Société et culture for awarding me a Doctoral Research Scholarship and making this research possible. I want to thank my supervisor and committee members, Neil ten Kortenaar, Monica Heller and Smaro Kamboureli, who guided this project and my trajectory in more ways than they will ever know. I feel immensely lucky to have worked with a committee that was equally challenging and rigorous, and generous and caring. Special thanks to Aphrodite Gardner and Bao Nguyen, whose support and kindness helped me make it to the finish line. Thank you to my student colleagues at the Centre for Comp Lit, especially to my dear friends Amelia, Matt, Nat and Rob for brightening my stay in Toronto. I also thank Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Joshua Whitehead for pushing me to challenge my understanding of translation, and everyone who’s accompanied me in the translation of their works, most notably Rodney Saint-Éloi. I am forever grateful to have had all these precious people accompany me throughout this journey. Enfin, un merci tout spécial à Vincent, Paco et Jackson, my boys, mon équilibre. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 0.1 Context, Corpus and Methodology ..................................................................................... 4 0.2 Outline of the Dissertation ................................................................................................ 13 Chapter One. Translation as Mapping: Undoing National Cartographies of Language ............... 20 1.1 On Becoming a Translator: Conventional Understandings of Language in the Field of Translation ........................................................................................................................ 20 1.2 The Making of a Language: Linguistic Differentiation, Standardization, and Appropriation .................................................................................................................... 31 1.2.1 Constructing the “Proper” Language: Language Standardization ...................... 32 1.2.2 Drawing a Language’s Boundaries: The Notion of Linguistic Abjection .......... 41 1.2.3 Owning a Language: The Concept of Mother Tongue ....................................... 49 1.3 The Regime of Translation, The Real “Problem” Of Linguistic Diversity in Translation ........................................................................................................................ 59 1.4 Heteroglossia, Deterritorialization, and Postnational Cartographies of Language in Contemporary Canadian Works ........................................................................................ 65 Chapter Two. Talking Back to Monoglossia: Gregory Scofield’s Poetic Voice and France Daigle’s Dialogues Resist Standardization .............................................................................. 74 2.1 Belonging and Language in the Poetry of Gregory Scofield ............................................ 79 2.1.1 Scofield’s Articulation of Métis Identity and Language ..................................... 79 2.1.2 Heteroglossia Stripped Bare: Translation in Scofield’s Poetry ........................... 85 2.1.3 Mistrust of Translation in Scofield’s Work......................................................... 91 2.1.4 “I’ll Teach You Cree:” Scofield’s Invitation to Participate in Heteroglossia ..... 95 2.2 In Praise of Chiac: Language Ideologies Clash in France Daigle’s Pour sûr ................. 97 2.2.1 The Diglossic Distribution of Language in Pour sûr ........................................ 100 2.2.2 French qua Normative Institution in Pour sûr .................................................. 103 2.2.3 Chiac as Social Practice and Its Relation to Standard French........................... 111 2.2.4 The Incommensurability of French and Chiac in Pour sûr ............................... 116 2.3 Conclusion: Translation as Social Practice ..................................................................... 120 2.3.1 Potential Avenues for Translation ..................................................................... 124 vi Chapter Three. Queer Abjection and the Linguistic Order in Kevin Lambert’s Querelle de Roberval and Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed .................. 132 3.1 Linguisic Abjection and the Political Potential of the Abject ......................................... 134 3.2 Queer, Class, and Cultural Abjection: The Violence of Normativity and the Limits of Québécois French in Kevin Lambert’s Querelle de Roberval ....................................... 141 3.2.1 The Violence of Abjection ................................................................................ 141 3.2.2 The Rise and Fall of the Queer Abject in Querelle de Roberval ....................... 144 3.2.3 Exposing the Violence of Normativity: Language in Querelle de Roberval .... 149 3.2.4 Reclaiming Rural, Working-Class Speech: The Limits of Writing in a Québécois Vernacular ................................................................................................ 156 3.3 “i am virus to the system:” Indigiqueer Abjection and the Queering of Language in Joshua Whitehead’s full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed .................................. 166 3.3.1 The Abject in Joshua Whitehead’s Indigiqueer Poetics .................................... 166 3.3.2 Urine, Blood, Semen, Feces: The Lexicon of Abjection in full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed ............................................................................... 171 3.3.3 The Linguistic Abject in Whitehead’s Indigiqueer Poetics .............................. 177 3.3.4 The Queering of Language ................................................................................ 184 3.4. Conclusion: Translating the Queer, Queering Translation ............................................. 189 Chapter Four. Motherless Tongues: Writers In and Out of Montreal Navigate the Waters of Linguistic Identity, Affiliation and Belonging ....................................................................... 195 4.1 The Depropriation of Language