The Canadian feminists’ translation project: between feminism and postcolonialism

In this article, Canada and Quebec are taken as case studies providing some interesting examples of inter-linguistic but intra-national translation, texts presenting features which can be addressed under the broad rubric of postcolonialism, especially as far as the power relations between the English and French languages in Canada are concerned. As a matter of fact, the socalled politics of translation appear only too clearly if we analyze the texts which are translated across the border between Canada and Quebec. Within this context, there has been a group of writers and scholars from both linguistic areas who have been willing to meet on a different ground – the ground of feminist writing and translation. Among the most important women in the group, Barbara Godard and Sherry Simon, as well as writers such as Nicole Brossard and Daphne Marlatt, deserve to be mentioned for the visibility their works have achieved in the past decades, and for the issues they raise.

Watson, Sheila (1909–1998)

Canadian writer Sheila Watson (1909–1998) is best known for her modernist novel The Double Hook (1959) about the redemptive struggles of a small, rural community as they deal with the murder of one of their members. Born Sheila Martin Doherty in New Westminster, BC, Watson received her BA, (Hons) in English (1931) and MA (1933) from the University of British Columbia. She taught elementary students in a number of rural schools in British Columbia before marrying Wilfred Watson in 1941. She then continued to teach in Toronto, in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, and in Powell River, BC While living in Calgary during 1951–52, Watson completed The Double Hook, which was published to mixed reviews. After its publication, Watson began her PhD under he guidance of Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto and completed her dissertation Wyndham Lewis: Post Expressionist at the University of Alberta in 1961. While working as a professor at the University of Alberta, Watson continued to write and publish. She maintained correspondence with several Canadian scholars and writers, including Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, and Daphne Marlatt. After her retirement in 1980, Sheila and her husband moved to Nanaimo, BC, where they died in 1998.

Postmodernist and Literary Experiments

This chapter examines postmodernist and literary experiments in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. It first considers Australia's brand of postmodernism, noting that it was much less a reaction to modernism than an effect of American influences that developed mid-century and a reflection on its late emergence from the colonial condition. It shows that Australian literature and its institutions since the 1930s had maintained a distant and uncomfortable relationship with literary modernism. Key writers discussed include Peter Carey, Gerald Murnane, and Elizabeth Jolley. The chapter goes on to discuss how Canada's scholars and writers, such as Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt have been interwoven in the genealogy of postmodern fiction in the Americas before concluding with an analysis of the postmodern novel in New Zealand and the South Pacific. Important writers here include Ian Wedde, Albert Wendt, and Sia Figiel.

Acts of Passage: Women Writing Translation in Canada1

This article discusses the relationship of writing and translation in Canadian feminist poetics, specifically experimental. As feminist poetics collapsing the boundaries between theory and creative act, “writing as translation” is a mode of articulation for female subjectivity and a strategy for oppositional poetics. The article engages with the practice of “writing as translation” in the works of two leading avant-garde artists, the francophone Nicole Brossard and the anglophone Daphne Marlatt, located respectively in Montreal and Vancouver. Building on the groundbreaking critical work of Barbara Godard, Kathy Mezei and Sherry Simon, it situates these practices in the socio-political and intellectual context of the 1970s and 1980s, which witnessed the emergence of women’s movements, feminist communities and feminist criticism, and in relation to the politics of translation in Canada. This historicization is necessary not only to understand the innovative work of Canadian feminist poetics but also the political dissemination of a feminist culture bringing together English and French Canada.