by Yann Martel
Sent to you by Émile Martel
June 21, 2010
To Stephen Harper,
The splendid translation of a most
entertaining Québécois novel,
From a Canadian poet and translator,
Émile Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
In a democracy, it is a cherished privilege of the citizen to address directly the leader of his or her country. We all know in our hearts that it is the duty of the leader to respond to these efforts. Matters of interest or concern may need to be addressed this way, and adequate responses often ensure an element of serenity to the citizen who has initiated the dialogue, as well as provide the leader with clues about the soul and the mind of his or her fellow citizens.
When Yann asked me to join in on the What Is Stephen Harper Reading? book club, I was positively elated because it gave me a role, as a poet and as a translator, in this campaign, which, you will have learned, has been noted and admired in many a country and matches a cherished belief I have in international cultural relations, a foreign policy your government absurdly dropped, which was not only a great loss to Canadian artists and creators, but also a blow to Canada’s image abroad.
The novel I’m sending you today was published in French in Montreal in 2007 and received the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation to English in 2009; so you have two books here resulting from the special and exceptional talents of two artists: a novelist and a translator.
The book, Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner, was very well received both in Quebec and in France; it won many prizes, and has been beautifully translated by Lazer Lederhendler.
The profession of translator is a discreet and humble one. We translators are seldom noticed and hardly anybody ever believes that we did our work right. There is always a nuance, always the shadow of an emotion that we missed, or there is a smell or a taste that we have exaggerated or understated. Whatever we do, we know that another translator in a few years will do differently, may even do better, just as a reader or a writer who understands both languages is likely to say that the original is much, much better than the translation. Of course it’s better! Most of the time.
But the translator can sometimes take some sort of a revenge. There is an anecdote I like to tell: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet near the end of the sixteenth century. About one hundred years later, Voltaire was born in France. Two pillars of European and world culture. Naturally, Voltaire knew of Shakespeare and read his works. One day he wanted to share with his readers, in French, the most famous line uttered by Hamlet:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
How would these ten words be translated in a way that respected not only the desperate intensity of the original English, but adopted the common form of French verse in use at the time, the twelve-syllable rhyming “alexandrins”? This way:
Demeure, il faut choisir, et passer à l’instant
de la vie à la mort, et de l’être au néant.
An interesting exercise would be to take Voltaire’s two verses without knowing Shakespeare’s original verse and translate them back to English. Translation can be a magical cave revealing beauties even the author did not know about …
Returning to Nikolski, whichever version you read first, the French original or the English translation, your attention will be drawn to the cover illustration: three fish, the same three fish, actually, but swimming in different directions, horizontally in one and vertically in the other. I believe there is a slightly different message there, although I’m not sure what that message is. What do you think?
The novel is a splendid construction of twisted and adventurous lives where various characters hover around each other in a dance of chance and luck, mostly around the Marché Jean-Talon in Montreal, but also in other places in Canada—among them the Prairies and the north shore of the Saint Lawrence—and in distant Caribbean countries. Piracy is important in this book, and navigation. And a fishmonger, and … and … You’ll love that crowd once you get to know Noah and Joyce and the narrator who sells used books on rue Saint-Laurent.
The French version has a dedication from Nicolas Dickner to our granddaughter Catherine, encouraging her to “return to the novel.” She’d told us that she hadn’t read a novel in a while. But she already had a copy of the book. So allow me to encourage you, too, to return to the novel, fulfilling the wish of Nicolas Dickner.
With my best wishes,
Émile Martel
Born in Rivière-du-Loup in 1972, NICOLAS DICKNER grew up in Quebec and studied visual arts and literature in university. Afterwards, he travelled extensively in Europe and Latin America before settling in Montreal. His first novel, Nikolski, won three awards in Quebec, one in France, and was the winner of Canada Reads 2010. He currently writes a weekly column for Voir, and his most recent book is Apocalypse for Beginners.
ÉMILE MARTEL (b. 1941) is a writer and translator. He worked as a diplomat from 1967 to 1999, serving twelve years at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, four of them as the minister for cultural affairs. He has published seventeen books of poetry and fiction, thirty Spanish and thirteen English translations, most of them in cooperation with Nicole Perron-Martel. He was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Pour orchestre et poète seul in 1995. He is the President of the Centre québécois du PEN international.
BOOK 85:
HOW I LIVE NOW
BY MEG ROSOFF
Sent to you by Alice Kuipers
July 5, 2010
To Stephen Harper,
A book to colour your imagination,
Sent by a writer,
Alice Kuipers
Dear Mr. Harper,
Books sometimes come to you at serendipitous times. For me, the reading of How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff coincided with a time in my life when I was spending several weeks in rural England. The novel is wonderful. It starts with fifteen-year-old Daisy arriving in the UK to stay with her cousins on a farm. Their mother leaves, and then a war begins. Rosoff never tells the causes of the war. Daisy is not interested. She’s too busy falling in love with her cousin, the compelling and startling Edmond. Soon the events of the war separate them and Daisy is transformed.
In the UK this Easter a strange thing happened. The skies closed because of the giant ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano. Planes were prevented from flying. I was in Devon in a cottage on Dartmoor. After a couple of days with no flights, I began to notice how eerily quiet the skies were. I lolled in the flower-filled garden, the moors spread before me, the book dangling from my hand as I stared into the empty blue above. The extraordinary story of Daisy and her cousins roaming around a rural landscape blighted by rationing and violence had seeped from the pages, staining my imagination. The creepy silence of the skies echoed the cessation of flights in the novel. I couldn’t laze around the garden without feeling the cousins hurtling around behind me on their way to their barn. I couldn’t get up and walk over the moors without seeing Daisy frantically searching for Edmond.
Meg Rosoff published How I Live Now in 2004 and gave up her career in advertising shortly after that. It was her first book but since then she has published many more (a thrilling discovery for me as I now have all the rest to read). She regularly updates her blog at www.megrosoff.co.uk. She wrote of her most recent novel:
For the best part of two years, the book has been constantly in my space, whining, stonewalling, refusing to play ball. I’ve been hating it, loving it, neglecting it; threatening, cajoling, pleading, throwing it out with the bath water, retrieving it; practicing tough love, bribery and suggesting it go play in traffic. Once I even told it I wasn’t its real mother.
She seems to feel that her book is somehow alive. I wonder if she felt the same way when writing How I Live Now. I’m going to hazard a guess that she did. Writers feel that way about their characters and their stories. And when a writer is as talented as Rosoff, the reader feels life pulsing from the pages of her books.
Rosoff’s writing is brave and moving. She writes of a teenager who is sent to England because she is destroying herself—both emotionally and, we discover, physically. It’s almost too late for Daisy, yet during her time in this country at war, she discovers that she is so much more than she gave herself credit for. It’s a classic story of trial and redemption, and it’s a love story. It’s a story of survival and of longing. This novel is alive. It leaves the page and tints your imagination like water coloured with a drop of blue dye.
This year as the sky lay empty of planes, as the moors before me filled with Daisy and her story, life spilled from Rosoff’s pages and I felt more alive.
I hope that this novel comes at a serendipitous time for you too (although maybe without the drama of an entire country shutting down its airspace!). May it stain your imagination blue.
Yours respectfully,
Alice Kuipers
REPLY:
September 3, 2010
Dear Ms. Kuipers,
On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence, with which you enclosed a copy of the book entitled How I Live Now.
Thank you for sending this book to the Prime Minister. Your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.
Yours sincerely,
T. Lewkowicz
Executive Correspondence Officer
MEG ROSOFF (b. 1956) is an American writer. After working in publishing and advertising in New York City in the 1980s, she moved to London, where she still lives. She has written books for children, young adults and adults.
BOOK 86:
STUNG WITH LOVE:
POEMS AND FRAGMENTS
BY SAPPHO
Translated from the Greek by Aaron Poochigian
July 19, 2010
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Poetry that has crossed the desert of time,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
I’m back and you’re still there. So let’s resume this lopsided duet where I read, think, write and mail, and you say and do nothing. Your silence doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s future generations who will damn you or, more likely, mock you. Me? I feel like a cowboy in a western who is about to cross a fearsome desert. To comfort myself, I talk out loud. Does my horse answer me? No, it doesn’t. Would I therefore want to do without it? No, because without it I would lose what defines me as a cowboy—and I would have to cross that desert on foot. You are my democratic horse through which I exist as a democratic cowboy. Better to ride on your sullen back than to be trampled down by a dictator. As for these troubled times, the desert that faces us? I have faith that we’ll get through it, somehow. I’ll be guided by the books I read and the people I meet. And you, our leader? I don’t know. Do blind horses get across deserts? Are they not swallowed up by the sands?
Before I go on, I should ask: have you enjoyed the books that some fine fellow Canadian writers have sent you while I was on tour for my latest novel? I am grateful to Steven Galloway, Charlie Foran, Alice Kuipers, Don McKay, René-Daniel Dubois and Émile Martel for contributing to your burgeoning library. Those are interesting titles they sent you.
Poor Greece. It has certainly received a beating these last few months. The mismanagement of its finances has cost the country—and a number of European banks—very dearly. I’m not entirely sympathetic to their woes. By the sounds of it, the blame for the problems of the Greeks can largely be laid upon the shoulders of the Greeks—and then they were preyed upon by greedy banks, who saw profit in making easy loans to them. A real mess, an insolvency that will tar and mar the country for years to come.
Yet a country can’t be reduced to its pockets, whether deep or full of holes. Poor Greece, rich Greece, mismanaged Greece, recovering Greece—next to that monolith of a proper noun those adjectives are mere twigs. Greece is Greece is Greece, and there is much to that. For starters, the language and its alphabet, lovely and arresting. I count the Greek language as one of the most pleasing vocal instruments our species has come up with. Italian, spoken next door, perhaps has a more lissome, mellifluous form, but Greek has the staccato intensity of content. Western philosophy, and therefore Western civilization—since before we do we must think—started with the Greeks, specifically with the Greeks living in Ionia, in Asia Minor, now Turkey. They became known as the pre-Socratics since they were not quite weighty enough to be given their own name but rather became defined by the illustrious philosopher whom they preceded. Nevertheless, those pre-Socks—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, elsewhere the formidable Parmenides of Elea, besides others—are important because they were the first to try to understand the world by relying not on myth but on reason. They observed the world, something that hadn’t been done before in the West. That inspired intellectual approach, which brought Greece a blaze of renown, was such a singular achievement that when the Italians did the same some two thousand years later, inspired in part by the rediscovery of some forgotten Greek philosophers named Plato and Aristotle, it was called the renaissance, after the initial naissance brought about by the ancient Greeks.
Well, at the same time that the Greeks were thinking, some of them were also feeling. So Sappho. I haven’t sent you poetry in a long while. Sappho was a woman who lived on the island of Lesbos roughly between the years 630 and 570 BCE. She is held to be the first woman poet in literary history. Those who came before her have been lost to time. Sappho’s poetry itself—some 9,000 lines in total, it is estimated—has barely survived the predation of time and exists only in fragments. In the late nineteenth century in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, an ancient garbage dump containing vast quantities of papyrus was discovered. Much of it had been used by the ancient Egyptians as stuffing to fill the empty spaces in coffins and mummies. In one mummified crocodile’s stomach, a fragment of poetry by Sappho was found. (That must have been one happy croc, to be digesting a morsel of Sappho’s poetry for centuries.)
Though Sappho wrote on a variety of subjects, she is best known for her love poetry. It is simple and moving. Take this fragment:
Sweet mother, I can’t take shuttle in hand.
There is a boy, and lust
Has crushed my spirit—just
As gentle Aphrodite planned.
Weaving was a female activity. A virginal girl who properly married would continue weaving as the head of her household. But if she was led astray … It’s interesting to note the feminine empowerment in this fragment. The girl is aware of the options that are available to her. It is for her to choose whether to take hold of the shuttle again and focus on her weaving, or turn to the boy. Another fragment gives us a clue about her choice:
Since I have cast my lot, please, golden-crowned
Aphrodite, let me win this round!
Here’s another heartfelt cry from twenty-six centuries ago:
That impossible predator,
Eros the Limb-Loosener,
Bitter-sweetly and afresh
Savages my flesh.
Like a gale smiting an oak
On mountainous terrain,
Eros, with a stroke,
Shattered my brain.
But a strange longing to pass on
Seizes me, and I need to see
Lotuses on the dewy banks of Acheron.
Acheron was one of the rivers of the Underworld, and the lotuses on its edge were associated with forgetfulness. The poet is so lovesick that she wants to die and eat the flowers of amnesia.
Some of the poems are surprisingly explicit:
Time and again we plucked lush flowers, wed
Spray after spray in strands and fastened them
Around your soft neck; you perfumed your head
Of glossy curls with myrrh—lavish infusions
In queenly quantities—then on a bed
Prepared with fleecy sheets and yielding cushions,
/> Sated your craving …
It’s the “yielding cushions” that really makes this hot stuff. Sappho laments the ravages of old age:
As you are dear to me, go claim a younger
Bed as your due.
I can’t stand being the old one any longer,
Living with you.
She also widens her gaze to topics that might be called political, and what she has to say is pertinent to this day:
Wealth without real worthiness
Is no good for the neighbourhood;
But their proper mixture is
The summit of beatitude.
I’ll quote one last fragment, a prescient one:
I declare
That later on,
Even in an age unlike our own,
Someone will remember who we are.
Indeed. Sappho lived among people who were mostly illiterate. Amazing that poetry performed aloud and preserved initially only in the memories of her listeners should survive to this day. They are fragments, true, and who is to say what treasures were obliterated by time (or continue to lie dormant in a mummified animal lying under Egyptian sands). But what survives still speaks—and what more can one ask of a poem? The passion of Sappho’s poetry has something volcanic to it: the print may be thin and black, but just beneath it runs molten magma.
So when you have Greece on your mind, as I’m sure you have recently, I hope you manage to take the long view. Economics is a short-term concern. What endures is art. Ask any crocodile how to survive a desert and it will tell you: better to have a poem in your stomach than a number in your head.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
SAPPHO (CA. 630–570 BC) was a lyric poet in Ancient Greece, born on the island of Lesbos. Her poetry, which frequently focused on themes of love and companionship, survives mostly in fragments (potsherds and papyri).