RENÉE HULAN
The essay tests the accuracy of the assertion that Forever Yours, Marie-Lou survives its translation by following the development of the translation from the translators' preliminary notes to the prompt script provided for the 1972 Tarragon production and the final published translation. Comparisons of these layers chart the direct impact of translation on the script with specific reference to how Marie-Lou and Carmen are remoulded. The essay concludes that, as the play was translated, revised, and edited, it underwent a gradual yet appreciable contextual erosion.
En comparant les diverses versions de Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, depuis les premières esquisses des traducteurs, jusqu'au texte utilisé lors de la production au Théâtre Tarragon en 1972 et jusqu'à la version publiée après ces représentations, cet article interroge la qualité de la traduction anglaise de la pièce surtoutpar rapport aux critiques de l'époque qui ont évalué que la pièce avait survécu à sa traduction en anglais. L'article suggère en conclusion que le texte original a subi une érosion importante tout au cours de ce processus de traduction, de révision et de publication.
Translation is like smuggling across a linguistic border. The attraction of this statement, a metaphor appropriated from Philip Stratford's essay entitled "The Anatomy of a Translation: Pélagie-la-Charrette" (122), lies in its recognition that texts are transferable commodities whose exchange can be a risky business. In 1972, John Van Burek and Bill Glassco crossed a double frontier by bringing cultural contraband over the Québec-Ontario border in the shape of an English version of Tremblay's À toi pour toujours ta MarieLou. What Van Burek and Glassco accomplished for Tarragon Theatre was ambitious for its time and for its attempt to give joual an English-Canadian context. When Forever Yours, Marie-Lou opened at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto that year, it enjoyed the undivided attention of theatre critics, but its reception was mixed. Although Toronto critics generally praised the play, their analyses tended to hold it at arm's length. Herbert Whittaker's enthusiastic yet vague appraisal in the Globe and Mail is as typical of the English media's reaction to the translated version of the play as it is indicative of his authoritative style: "Forever Yours, Marie-Lou is not without levels of insight, which reaches audiences beyond its point of origin, for Tremblay is a writer of apparent power and relentless drive" (15 Nov. 1972: 15).
The 1972 translation in English was a kind of first-contact piece for the Toronto audience, and its reception bears signs of that historical position. Toronto critics were eager to introduce the Toronto audience to Tremblay's work, embedding it in the Toronto theatre scene to which their columns were addressed. Whereas the critical reception of the original Marie-Lou in the Québec press had stressed the painful isolation of its characters and their frustrated efforts to speak out of individual solitude, the Ontario press focused on the play's merit and potential universality. As often as French language reviews used the verb "figer" to describe the action,1 English language reviews used "Tremblay" to offer assessments of talent and value. When Marie-Lou returned to Toronto in 1975, Whittaker praised it once again as "a tragedy which is both personal, regional and universal," and virtually excused its Québec origins with the comment: "Tremblay may have selected his targets from his local audience ... but his range is not conspicuously limited by that" (Globe and Mail 5 June 1975: 12). After describing Tremblay as "Toronto's favorite Canadian playwright," UrJo Kareda's review further erased the play's context along with the author's identity: "Tremblay himself would say that he's a Québec playwright, not Canadian at all, but never mind" (Toronto Star 5 June 1975: Ell). While Québec and Europe were describing the original play as, in the words of director Pierre Gobeil, "une pièce qui poncture une realité sociale" (La Tribune 4 Nov. 1978: 23), English Canada was expecting to see itself shine back in a reflection of otherness.
In an attempt to understand the radical ambivalence in the popular critical reception of the Tarragon production and the legacy of that ambivalence, the following essay takes a forensic approach which reads and responds to the remains of the play's brief, ephemeral life in performance at Tarragon. To test the accuracy of the play's equivalence, this approach studies the different stages in the evolution of the Van Burek-Glassco translation by using the Tarragon theatre's prompt script from the 1972 production, the revised translation which was published in 1975, and the text Van Burek and Glassco refined for use at Stratford in 1990 as well as the translators' notebooks and correspondence.2 Reconstructing performance in this way tests the boundaries of scholarship, because little constrains an interpretation which looks back over many years at an event with only a transitory existence. In recognition of this problem, I have provided as much textual support as possible.
The permissibility of reviews as evidence poses other related problems. Because theatre critics who write reviews for the popular press may not be aware of critical debates taking place in theatre translation, their reviews should not be made to carry the full burden of interpretive authority. At the same time, they provide an immediate textual response to a theatrical production, and their words remain long after the audience has ceased to exist. Reviewers create the illusion of articulating the collective experience of watching the performance even if their reviews can not speak directly for the audience. Despite these problems, the reviews cited here are particularly compelling as artifacts of the performance because each one was preserved by the theatre itself as part of the Tarragon Theatre Archives, and a hint of authorization surrounds their preservation. Nevertheless, the use of theatre reviews at certain points in this essay is a consciously mediated use, one which recognizes the instability of the evidence they provide.
In the reviews of the 1972 Tarragon production cited already, critics ignored issues bearing on the quality of the translation and tended to interpret Forever Yours, Marie-Lou as a translation intended to reflect the source text faithfully-as if assuming a simple correspondence between Québec and English-Canadian culture could ensure the equivalence upon which the translation was based. Being faithful to a source text and its author requires having faith in an authentic language; however, allowing language to carry culture and context in this way poses some difficulties, the most dangerous of which is a potential fetishization of the text which means displacing and disavowing the difference it represents. Fetishization allowed critics to claim Tremblay while resisting the social context of his work.
Unlike its Toronto contemporaries who resisted the topic of translation, Jack Kapica's review in the Montreal Gazette boldly asserts "Tremblay Play Survives the Translation" then goes on to recognize the contribution of translators John Van Burek and Bill Glassco with glowing yet cautious praise for the "daring step in translating joual into English" and for resisting "the temptation to translate it too literally" (16 Nov. 1972: 36). By assessing its faithfulness to the original, Kapica suggests the play's authentic goods made their covert journey into English and emerged undamaged. Moreover, his review seems to resolve the central dilemma facing theatre translators, that is, whether to translate with the author or with the audience in mind.3
Despite Kapica's favourable assessment, Forever Yours, Marie-Lou does lapse into literal translation in places. One of Leopold's lines offers the most obvious and baffling example. Describing Marie-Lou's habitual way of behaving at her mother's, he says:
Your eyes in the fuckin' bean grease to get more pity. (Prompt script 4)
In the 1975 published version, the line omits "fuckin'" but retains the strange metaphor and the original syntax (Van Burek and Glassco 15). This is the literal translation of the original line: "Les yeux dans' graisse de binne, pour faire plus pitié" (Tremblay 40). In the 1990 version, the line "Your eyes in the bean grease to get more pity" (Van Burek and Glassco 14) remains.4
Although such lapses seem to forget the audience, the production's treatment of profanity suggests an awareness of "les exigences de la réception" (Brisset 26). Many of the reviews observe how Carmen's coarseness, especially her profane language, struck a public nerve in 1972. Jack Kapica describes the effect that "bad language" had on the audience as follows:
The language, more obscene than profane, slapped the audience squarely and resounded through the theatre like a war cry. A little upsetting at first, the purple evocations however carried an urgency that kept the tenor of the production at fever pitch. (Montreal Gazette 16 Nov. 1972: 36)
The language rubbed up against the sensibilities of the Toronto audience even though it represents a sanitized version of the original characters' speech. In particular, Marie-Lou and Carmen emerged from the process recreated. In Carmen's case, the deletion of profane remarks tends to weaken her contrast with her sister Marion. When she accuses Marion of getting too worked up over their parents, both the 1975 and 1990 versions punctuate the accusation with "for God's sake" (Van Burek and Glassco 30 and 28 respectively), but in the Tarragon prompt script "for God's sake" is crossed out (13). Later, in the same exchange, although the 1975 published translation of "T's compètement folle" (Tremblay 61) was "You're off your bloody rocker" (43), it appears as "You're out of your mind" (22) in the Tarragon prompt script. It seems that, responding to the potential demands of reception, the translators and perhaps the director anticipated and, to some extent, accommodated the audience's discomfort with "bad language." The tendency to reverse this process by reinserting the profanity in the 1990 version witnesses how that reception was historically specific.
The dialogue between Carmen and Marion offers a good focus for further analysis, because it captured the attention of several English language reviews of the Tarragon production. One theatre critic, Joseph Erdelyi, attributes weaknesses in the performance he attended to the writing rather than any other element contributing to the performed text when he describes Marion and Carmen as "superfluous" characters and Carmen as a "poorly written role" (Peterborough Examiner 15 Nov. 1972). Other, perhaps more prudent critics confined their remarks to the actress's interpretation of Carmen's part, but none refer to the translation. Herbert Whittaker writes that June Keevil "plays Carmen with a kind of Hollywood tolerance, prettily but not avoiding monotony" (Globe and Mail 15 Nov. 1972: 15). Urjo Kareda, reviewing for the Toronto Star, observes that Keevil played the role "as if she found Carmen's coarseness against her instincts" (15 Nov. 1972: 24).
Singling out Carmen, as many critics did, seems to be a particular phenomenon of the Tarragon production and therefore pertains to the performance given by Keevil as well as the script used at that time. The revised text used at the Stratford Festival in 1990, and the different cast, did not provoke the same response. Michael J. Sidnell's review article in the Journal of Canadian Studies refers to the "inevitable(?) clash of language with culture in the English version" (136) as the reason why the play offered more of the idea of eternal misery than its actuality, but he refrains from locating blame with the play, the playwright or the translation, confining his criticism to the set design, staging, and direction.
Carmen's poor reviews cannot be attributed to her diluted profanity alone. For some reason, she remains "other" for the critics whose reviews react against her rather than consider her interaction with and contextualisation by other characters, both of which are factors in her plausibility and function. When the Tarragon production cleaned up Marie-Lou, it redefined Carmen. In both the English translation and the original, Marie-Lou says she put her foot in shit (marde) when she agreed to marry Leopold whereas the Tarragon prompt script reads "I put my foot in it" (41). Her references to Leopold as "maudit menteur" and Manon's echoing "maudite menteuse" become "liar." These changes result in a less vulgar Marie-Lou, a character who perhaps resembles the sainted mother image she has become in Marion's memory and who undermines the credibility of Carmen's memories. The audience may not understand Carmen's tough talk or her rebellion if the Marie-Lou presented conforms to the victimized image of Marion's reverence: this is contextual erosion.
Without a properly defined context, Carmen's role takes on sharp edges, especially against the sombre background provided by Manon. Theatre critic Joseph Erdelyi highlights this contrast when he calls Carmen's character "phoney" and her cowgirl costume "garish," but he fails to locate the problem in the gap between the original social setting, with which he is obviously unfamiliar, and the English language (Peterborough Examiner 15 Nov. 1972). Comparisons of the published text and the prompt script as well as correspondence between those who worked on the translation indicate that translating the dialogue between Carmen and Manon presented many difficulties for the translators.5 The evolution of the speech in which Carmen recalls the day of her great escape demonstrates those difficulties:
J'avais jamais osé dire à personne que j'voulais chanter, mais là, j'étais libre de foncer! "Le temps des lamentations est fini, que j'me disais ... Grouille!" Ah! j'te dirai pas que j'ai pas eu de misère, j'en ai eu ... mais j'me sus jamais lamentée ... (Tremblay 91)
In the prompt script the speech appears as follows:
I never dared tell anyone I wanted to be a singer, but after that I was free to go ahead and try. "It's not worth mourning," I said, "So move it, sister!" I won't say I had it easy, because I didn't ... But I never looked back ... (Prompt script 46)
The speech is reduced in the 1975 published text by the omission of the two phrases, "It's not worth mourning," and "So move it sister!" (Van Burek and Glassco 82). The 1990 translation reads as follows:
I never dared tell anyone I wanted to sing but after that I was free to go out and do it. The time for tears is over, I kept telling myself ... So move. I won't say it wasn't tough, 'cause it was ... But I never complained. (Van Burek and Glassco 78)
Despite these revisions, in general, the 1990 translation shows a trend towards returning to a syntax which approximates the original. Carmen's emphatic admonishment of Manon, "Ben oui, j'm'en rappelle de tout qa, Manon, ben oui, ça m'a faite mal, à moé aussi!" (Tremblay 70) became syntactically smooth in the Tarragon production as: "It's just as painful for me as it is for you" (Prompt script 28). Carmen's voice is neutralized in the movement away from Tremblay's original line, because the reduction of the line and the change in syntax offer different dramatic possibilities. Through translation, the line moves from a defiant, inarticulate cry to a cold, defensive statement whose brevity suggests ambivalence. Instead of sounding hurt and enraged, Carmen seems cold and distant-qualities which the audience may construe as signs of insensitivity. In the 1990 version, however, the revised line returns to the hesitancy of the original appearing as: "Of course I remember all that, Marion, and yes it hurt me too" (Van Burek and Glassco 51).
The 1990 revisions seem to acknowledge the limits of the 1972 translation. For instance, in the original Carmen refers to her childhood home as "c'te maudite prison W (Tremblay 93). After replacing "prison" with the more neutral "place" in the 1975 publication, the translators returned to the Tarragon wording in 1990:
And I'm so glad to be free of all the shit that went on in this prison.... (Van Burek and Glassco 80)
Because Carmen refers to Manon as a prisoner or shut-in, this reversal preserves the play's thematic continuity. In another moment, Carmen describes Manon's behaviour as an attempt "à essayer de faire pitié" and tells her "Tu fais pitié pantoute, Marion" (Tremblay 60). In the Tarragon version, Carmen specifies, saying "You look to me for pity," (Prompt script 21) and, in the 1990 version at Stratford, she says ". . . and you expect the world to pity you" followed by "Well, you're not pitiable Marion ... not in the least" (Van Burek and Glassco 40). With the addition of the tentative word "Well" and the pause effected by the ellipsis, Carmen's accusations sound softer, more hesitant, even gentler.
The subtle but real differences in the characters of Marie-Lou and Carmen indicate how translation transforms and creates and how impossible it is to remain uncompromisingly faithful to the author's original. Although the possibilities of Carmen's role undergo some serious transformation through translation, it is difficult to link any specific part of that transformation with the critical opinion of her reviewers. Her tough and defensive talk seemed extreme and phoney to some, but it should be considered in the context of her relationship with Manon, the sister from whom she can expect no sympathy. Carmen is the deserter; Manon is the one who stayed home. Carmen acts as a locus for the deferred dreams and dried-up hope of others, yet despite her alienation as an outsider, she returns and in an act of compassion says to Manon: "I've burned all the bridges, Manon . . . Except one . . ." (Van Burek and Glassco 52). The omission of "avec mon passé" (Tremblay 70) decides the interpretation of the line-with the symbolism of the bridge confined in this way, the proportions of her escape are also hemmed in. And the connection between Manon's chosen lifestyle and the historical past it represents has been ruptured.
The Tarragon theatre's prompt script for Forever Yours, Marie-Lou carries its scars like a map of the choices and problems the play presented to its translators. Each detail contributes to a context which joins the known and the unknown together, naturalizing and bringing them into contact with the receiving audience.6 To explain why the play was problematic for its reviewers, it is necessary to look at the context constructed because the fact remains: what attracted Québec critics in the 1970s, and perhaps the audiences they observed, was the interaction of characters and social context, the very thing which became a serious problem for the Ontario reviews of the Tarragon production.
Up to this point, I have observed how choices in the translation process impact upon the play's popular reception. In doing this, I may have appeared to rely on the assumed equivalence between the cultural context of joual and a context in which people speak a placeless "standard" Canadian English; however, this assumption does not obtain. For one thing, it suggests that language alone carries culture. The ideal of equivalence assumes a shared or at least partially shared cultural context which no doubt exists, but to take such sharing for granted would minimize the importance of the power differential between a dominant language and a marginalized one. It would be absurd to consider the positions of English and French in North America to be equivalent let alone the positions of the CBC's Canadian English and joual. Highlighting this difference opens up issues concerning the political dimensions of translation.
Joual participates in a strong and specific historical-cultural context that requires a creative interpretation capable of developing a social setting which reflects that of the original but which will be recognized by the audience receiving it.7 Because language is an important part of the social context, the strained spectacle of a Québec setting infused with Canadian English threatens to elide the linguistic difference which is part of what makes it Québecois. The characters are dispossessed, falling into the gap between language and society. The mixed reception of the Tarragon production shows how the gap between language and culture was not bridged by the context established in the performance. Moreover, the translation further obscures cultural difference by not reproducing the relationship between the dominant and the marginal in the language of translation.8 The task of recognizing and naturalizing the difference the play represents was left up to the audience. As a result, the critics denied that difference by trying to hold on to something 'universal'. The universality of Tremblay's work was constructed in reception as an expression of two conflicting desires: to claim the difference represented in the play and to reject the specific social context producing that difference. Difference was the fetish of the critics, the thing desired and disavowed simultaneously.
If the translation's use of Canadian English in the play's Québec context created discomfort, it was a discomfort with the equivalence upon which the translation was based-a discomfort for which the critics' praise and acceptance of Tremblay was compensation. In a recent article, Jane Koustas argues that Tremblay succeeds in Toronto "as a Canadian, not Québec, playwright due primarily to the universality, not québécitude, of his plays" (110). Her analysis demonstrates how complete the fetishization of Tremblay's work has been as well as the potential for cultural colonialism translation represents.
As Annie Brisset argues in Sociocritique de la traduction, the institutional structure of a society tends to determine how and what it receives in translation (29). The reception of Tarragon's Forever Yours, Marie-Lou was embedded in a time of growing literary nationalism in English Canada, and it demonstrates to what extent the translation of Québec texts into English has been as much a process of claiming them and embedding them within a Canadian literary canon as it has been a way of introducing Québec theatre to Canadian audiences. For the translator's part, the sense of incompletion offered by the constant evolution from the 1972 translation to the 1990 version opens a space for further dialogue and creativity. And that space, at least, denies the fetishization of difference.
NOTES
1 For examples, see Alain Pontaut's reference to the "mise en scène grise et figée" in Le Devoir
(11 Sept. 1971: 11). Later, Pierrette Roy would echo Pontaut in La Tribune (11 Nov. 1978:
22).
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2 All original documents from the Tarragon theatre are housed in the archives at the University
of Guelph.
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3 Jean-Luc Denis provides a useful discussion of the dilemma from the translator's perspective in
his article "Traduire le théàtre québécois en contexte québécois:essai de caractérisation d'une
practique" Jeu 56 (1990): 9-17. In it, he describes the translator's motivation as a desire to respect
and to transgress the world of the other (16).
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4 In fact, "to have one's eyes in bean grease" is listed as the literal translation of
"avoir ses yeux dans la graisse de binne" in Bergeron's The Québécois Dictionary (113).
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5 One hand-written note in the Tarragon archives reads: "My only reservation regards Carmen-Manon, which I think is not as good in the original to start with, but could be improved."
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6 Gilbert Turp argues that the translator should choose according to what seems appropriate for
the audience because such choices provide the context, and the context is the agent of
naturalisation (Jeu 56 (1990): 33).
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7 The problem has been outlined in Sherry Simon and David Homel's Mapping Literature: The Art and Politics of Translation (Montréal: Véhicule, 1988). See (34-8) and (55-69).
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8 Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay's choice of Scots as a language of translation does reproduce this relationship. According to Findlay: "the déclassé status of Scots in relation to standard English finds a parallel in the similar relationship of joual or Québécois to standard French, at least at the time that Tremblay wrote Les Belles-Soeurs in the sixties" (Salter MS 9).
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WORKS CITED
Bergeron, Léandre. The Québécois Dictionary. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1982.
Brisset, Annie. Sociocritique de la traduction: theâtre et altérité au Québec (1968-1988). Longeuil, QC: Les Éditions du Préambule, 1990.
________"Translation and Parody: Québec Theatre in the Making." Canadian Literature. 117 (1988): 92-106.
Denis, Jean-Luc. "Traduire le théâtre en contexte québécois: essai de caractérisation d'une practique." Special Issue Ed. Lorraine Camerlain. Jeu 56 (1990): 9-17.
Erdelyi, Joseph. "Forever Yours, Marie-Lou A Must See." Peterborough Examiner 15 Nov. 1972.
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________. "Theatre Plus Makes a Minus of Tremblay." Toronto Star 5 June 1975: E11.
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Salter, Denis. "Who's Speaking Here? Tremblay's Scots Voice." MS, 1993.
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_______. Dossier de Presse 1966-1981. Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Sherbrooke, 1981.
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________. Forever Yours, Marie-Lou. Trans. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990.
Whittaker, Herbert. "Forever Yours, Marie-Lou Offers Some Familiar Novelty." Globe and Mail 15 Nov. 1972: 15.
________. "Marie-Lou's Return Bids Goodbye to the Old Rule of Summer Fluff." Globe and Mail 5 June 1975: 12.