Translation is a Love AffairBy Jacques Poulin
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Reviewed by Nicolle Elizabeth
“We are talking about translation, which is defined first of all as a transport. Transport of language or transport of love.”
—Albert Bensoussan, from the prologue
A young woman’s perspective, written by a man, in French, and then translated into English by another woman, Jacques Poulin's Translation is a Love Affair is a tremendous and poetic work. The book is about translation, both literally and metaphorically, and what the act of translating the every day means: how do we translate literature, how do we translate what it is to be human? Our heroine, Marine, is herself a translator professionally, and a tool for Poulin to give us a stamp, a chance at engaging in poetry through prose. Marine engages us throughout the work with wit and heavy poetic labeling of two worlds: hers and ours.
We begin at the crossing of streams in the woods at the place “where murmurs meet,” or, when Marine swims, and watches and filters the world, as if she were a fish talking to us from within the stream herself. The "only rules [she accepts] are the rules of grammar." This stream, “where murmurs meet” will haunt us throughout the work.
Marine meets her love interest, a Quebecois novelist named Monsieur Waterman, on a cemetery bench, covered by books. She feels an immediate connection, noting that "his gaunt face, his grizzled and badly trimmed beard, his narrow glasses that didn't hide the bags under his eyes, his extreme thinness, his melancholy appearance - all gave [her] a sense of deja vu." It is through passages like this—these filterings of Marine's world—that Poulin draws us in and then intoxicates us.
Over and over, Poulin hits a note and holds it, singing it unchanging even as he adds new sounds to his novel's crescendo. One of these prominent notes comes in the form of the novel's third primary character, a black cat introduced beautifully, heavily, shadowed:
One night after supper, when I was coming back from one of these long walks, I let the black cat come in through the back door…I petted him and I noticed his collar was too tight. I unfastened it to see what was wrong: something was sticking out under the brass disk, a bit of paper sticking out. A brass disc was attached to the collar by four claws that were closed on the strip of leather. When I opened the claws…a piece of paper dropped onto the kitchen counter…I read the following note: My name is Famine. I am on the road because my mistress can’t take care of me.
In this fashion, the novel's atmosphere moves forward thickly, adding layer after layer, like smoke in a dark winter room. As Marine falls for Waterman and his writing, she says: "His books are like life. They contain hazy memories, yellowed photos, vague feelings, songs from days gone by, chance meetings, conversations in cafes…and the reader has to put it all back together as if it were a puzzle.”
Poulin never leaves behind this dialogue about literature, it’s sub-textually and loudly embedded in the story, so that Marine and Waterman are constantly redefining or refining the act of writing, of storytelling, of translating. Poulin writes, "Under the word refuge, I found this definition: 'Small structure high in the mountains where climbers can spend the night'," a seemingly innocuous phrase that he then calls "the best definition of a novel."
This philosophy—novel as refuge—is evident throughout the work, it is the work. Translation is a Love Affair is refuge -where it imbues the novel with much of its beauty and its plot, tied together thematically through translation, so that the writing of the original work gives way to the original work, which in turn gives way to both the act of translating and the new work that arises from it. Eventually this nesting of processes leads me back to Poulin's own words, when Marine, speaking of her own translations, says, "I wanted my words to hug the curves of his writing.” In this way, Poulin shows us once again how the written word can serve to translate our own lives and the lives of those around us. How we translate what we are filtering. Archipelago Books should be recognized for finding and publishing this incredible work, as should Sheila Fischman, for her excellent translation of these fine pages.