Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation,

Creativity: A Case Study

Gillian Lane-Mercier
McGill University
Abstract

One of the most formidable problems faced by English Canadian translators of

Quebec literature is the presence of joual in the works of novelists and
playwrights since the 1960s. Defined as a substandard variety of French spoken
in the working class neighbourhoods of Montreal, joual stands out from the other
varieties of Quebec French due to the large number of anglicisms it contains and
the nationalist connotations it conveys. As such, one of literary jouals most
obvious features is its untranslatability. This paper proposes to explore some of
the issues jouals untranslatability has raised in the Canadian and Quebec
contexts by using David Homels 1984 retranslation of Jacques Renauds novel
Le cass (1964) as a case study. Homels translation strategies serve to
corroborate the hypothesis that untranslatability can be a powerful source of
linguistic and ethical creativity in a given literary, political and socio-cultural
context.

I should like to begin by briefly commenting on some of the linguistic,

ideological and ethical translation effects produced by two English
renderings of a passage from the same French source text. My
comments will conform to the following momentarily erroneous
scenario: I am a unilingual, English-Canadian reader with an interest
in Quebec literature, culture and politics since the 1960s, who must
rely on translation to acquire an insight into the Quebec perspective
on such matters. I wish to know more about Quebecs desire to
separate from Canada. I have just come across two English versions
of a novel by Jacques Renaud published in 1964, one year after the
first bombs set by the separatist movements radical fringe exploded.
The cover page of the first translation has caught my eye due to its
rather unsettling albeit ultimately reassuring political implications,
together with its confrontational bilingualism.1 It reads:
the entire
explosive
Quebec best-seller
by J. RENAUD
Translated from Quebekish
by GERALD ROBITAILLE
IVE
EBEC
IBRE

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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

FLAT BROKE AND BEAT

(Le Cass)2
The unsettling aspects stem as much from the partially effaced but
easily recognizable (even for unilingual Anglophones) separatist
slogan Vive le Qubec libre as from the words explosive and bestseller, with their respective terrorist and collectivist connotations,
whereas the more reassuring aspects can be found at once in the
quaint, vaguely ridiculous neologism Quebekish, the implicit causeand-effect relationship between explosive and Beat, as well as the
mainstream implications of best-seller which counteract the more
politically oriented collectivist connotations. In contrast, the cover of
the second version conveys significantly less information: title: Broke
City; author: Jacques Renaud; translator: David Homel. I have further
noted that Robitailles translation was published the same year as the
original (1964), whereas Homels retranslation appeared in 1984,
accompanied by the following disclaimer: The publication of the
present translation should not be construed as a critical refutation of
Le casss first translation.
Bearing this scenario in mind, here are the translated excerpts.
The hero, Ti-Jean, who believes his girlfriend Philomne is having an
affair with Bouboule, has just awakened from a nightmare in which he
threw Philomne out the window:
Ti-Jean sat up on the edge of the bed...The slut, I
pitched her out... []. I pitched her out... The bitch!
I want her to get a mug nobody can look at... I dont
want anyone to put his dirty paw on her... No one
cept me... Me! No one but me! Kryce! Bouboule, it
must be true... Hes nothing but a fuckin runt! Ill
bust his mug in, that lousy son of a bitch! Ill smash
him to bits! Kill him... just hit an kick till hes done
for! Bouboule is a son of a bitch... Im sure Yves is
right... Bouboule, he sleeps with Mmne... And
her, she lets him the tramp. Bouboules a good fer
nothin bum... Its him sells dope... Hes a dirty pig...
Her, Ill break her to bits! To bits, goddam it! ... Ill
kill em both!...Bouboule, you Ill kill ya! The filthy
dog! (Renaud, 1964b, pp. 54-56)
Johnny sat up on the edge of the bed... I threw that
cunt right out the window... []. I threw her right out
on her ass, that bitch...! I wanted to carve her face
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

up but good... So nobodyd wanna touch her... Cept

me... Just me! Dammit! Must be true, her and
Bubbles... That little snot-nose scum! Gonna kill that
bastards ass! Gonna waste him but good! Kill him
with my fists and my feet! Bubbles is a son of a
bitch. ... Ask me, Yves is right. Bubbles sleepin with
Mena... And she lets him do it, that bitch! Bubbles a
fuckin bum... A pusher... A bastard... Im gonna
break that bitch in two! In ten, goddammit...! Im
gonna waste the both of em...! Bubbles, Im gonna
kill your ass! Son of a bitch! (Renaud, 1984, pp. 4849)
I would like to argue that, in the Anglo-Canadian context of the mid1960s, Robitailles translation strategy produces a number of
alienating effects with respect to Quebecs otherness that Homels
very different translation strategy defuses and displaces in the AngloCanadian context of the mid-1980s. My overall aim is to test the
general hypothesis according to which the translator may be
perceived as a writer and, by extension, a creator in his or her own
right insofar as the translation process relies heavily on problem
solving which, in turn, implies an uneasy and ever-shifting balance
between novelty and appropriateness, liberty and constraint
(Balacescu & Stefanink, 2003). By so doing, I should like to test the
more limited hypothesis that the ensuing notions of the translators
agency and creativity cannot be reduced to questions of mere
linguistic or stylistic prouesse, as much recent scholarship on the
subject has tended to do. Rather, the translators writerly and creative
activity should also be linked to questions of ethical novelty and
appropriateness, where ethics is defined not only as the relationship
between self and other, but also as the translators responsibility or
lack thereof with respect to the source text, target reader
expectations, and, as the case may be, previous translations of the
same source text. As I hope to show, the translators writerly and
creative activity is as much a result of his or her linguistic liberties as
of what I shall call context-bound freedoms which include not just the
source-text, but pre-existing images of otherness as well that act as
ethical constraints against which context-bound freedoms derive their
innovative power. In other words, the translator as writer-creator must
be attentive to the images of self and other generated by his or her
writerly and creative activity within the target culture, especially when
he or she is faced with certain types of translation problems, such as
untranslatability, which demand a heightened sense of linguistic
creativity.
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

Let us return now to our two translated passages for, as we

shall soon see, untranslatability is indeed the source of some of the
conflicting ethical effects they convey. The question we must ask is:
what images of English Canada (self) and of Quebec (other) do these
passages construct, and how? While there are obvious similarities
between the two excerpts, most notably the uneducated level of TiJeans/Johnnys speech, the abundant use of vulgarisms and
obscenities, together with the vocabulary of violence, sex and drugs,
there are just as obvious differences that seem to point to two
opposing translation strategies and two opposing ethical stances.
From a linguistic perspective, Robitailles version not only
retains the characters French nicknames, more importantly, it
contains unidiomatic expressions such as kryce and pitched her
out, as well as a fairly impressive series of Gallicisms.3 It also
presents significant variations in language register which alternate
between vulgarisms (fuckin), familiar insults (dirty pig, tramp),
colloquialisms (good fer nothin, paw) and standard speech (Im
sure Yves is right.). When combined, these choices point to a literal
or, as Sherry Simon (1994) has called it, an ethnographic
translation strategy ostensibly designed to respect both the authority
of the original and its cultural difference (literally: Quebecs
untranslatability). Readers of Flat Broke and Beat can not for one
second forget that they are reading a foreign text.4
From an ethical perspective, such a strategy, in particular the
very insistent presence of unidiomatic expressions and literalisms,
serves at once to remind Anglo-Canadian readers that the cultural
divide between us and them is intact, and to create the (self-?)
satisfying illusion that we are being provided a direct insight into
contemporary Quebec society, per force very different from ours.5
More to the point, from an ideological perspective such a strategy
also serves to attenuate the explosive potential of the novels verbal
and thematic violence by inducing an alienating effect that sets the
Anglophone reader at a distance from the folklorish, colourful, at
times incomprehensible (Kryce?) and consequently politically
innocuous speech of the cultural other. One can almost sense the
readers political relief: Quebec separatism doesnt stand a chance
with people who say filthy dog, Bouboule, you Ill kill ya, (and
elsewhere) Bunch o nitwits, Its daffy this or Ti-Jean swallows his
own spit. In other words, Robitailles literal, more often than not wordfor-word rendering reinforced current day Anglo-Canadian
stereotypes and condescending attitudes with respect to Quebec,
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

maintained the cultural gap (read: imbalance) between the two

founding nations, together with the diglossia (cultural and linguistic
inferiority) it fostered, thereby allaying the fears ignited in English
Canada by the terrorist factions of Quebecs nationalist movement.
After all, Quebec language, culture and nationalist politics were no
more than harmless quebekish whatever that means , as the
translations cover page had already suggested.
In contrast, Homels version tends heavily toward the
idiosyncratic; it also contains a larger quantity of vulgarisms which
strengthen the thematic violence, as well as numerous syntactic
deformations, notably the frequent elision of the grammatical subject.
Furthermore, his consistent recourse to North American street slang,
which Homel himself qualified as a generalized, big-city, workingclass, northern, white dialect (1985, p. 23), allows for very little
variation in language register. The term generalized is key here, for
it underscores the delocalized, quasi-universal aspect of this
register. Indeed, by occulting the geo-political and cultural origins of
the main characters who, after all, could just as well be from
Toronto or Chicago or San Francisco urban street slang eschews
questions of local colour and cultural difference in the name of
sociolinguistic equivalence or sameness. Of course the informed
reader knows the characters are from Montreal,6 but he or she may
not realize they are supposed to be French-speaking, for their
substandard register is distinctly ours, as are the anglicized names
of the main characters. Homels use of equivalence, which is usually
associated with conservative translational practices of acculturation
and assimilation from a political and ethical standpoint, thus produces
the exact opposite effect of Robitailles rendering, at least on the
surface: rather than calling attention to the cultural gap so as to better
consolidate it, the characters idiomatic speech fosters a sense of
(self)recognition: they are/could be (like) us.
This, however, is only half the story. On the one hand, Homels
acculturating translation flouts the condescending ethnographic
discourse of cultural curiosity informing Robitailles literal version; on
the other hand, it brings into focus the otherness that is, the
stigmatized, the excluded, the downtrodden existing within, rather
than without, the linguistic and sociocultural parameters of our
society. Put differently, whereas Robitailles supposedly foreignizing,
source-oriented translation choices ultimately serve the dominant
target-language culture by reassuring the Anglophone reader,
Homels supposedly domesticating, target-oriented translation
choices challenge the reader to confront head-on issues of
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

sociolinguistic marginalization, colonization and (counter-)violence

that not only plagued Qubec society during the 1960s, but plague
Canadian society as a whole twenty years later. I shall return to this
point in a moment.
In order to link these linguistic and ethical effects to questions of
writing and creativity, I should now like to modify my initial scenario:
our English Canadian reader is in fact perfectly bilingual and,
understandably confused, wants to confront these two very different
renderings with the original passage:
Ti-Jean sest assis sur le bord du lit... Lhostie, jlai
pitche dehors... []. Je lai pitche dehors... La
chienne! Jvoudrais qua soye pus rgardable... Que
pas personne mette la patte dessus... Except
mo... Mo! Rien qumo! Crisse! Bouboule a doit
tre vrai... Cest rien quun petit crisse de morviat!
Mas dy casser a yeule cte chien sale-l! Mas
dy pter a face! A coups de poings pis coups de
pieds! Bouboule cest un hostie dchien... Pour mo
Yves a raison... Bouboule y couche avec Mmne...
Pis elle, a slaisse faire, la crisse! Bouboule cest un
bomme. Cest lui qui vend dla dpe... Cest un
coeurant... Elle, mas tla casser en dix! En dix,
tabarnac!... Mas les tuer tous deux! (Renaud,
1964a, pp. 42-44)
What we have here is an excellent example of literary joual, defined
as the lexically impoverished, grammatically incorrect, phonetically
deviant variety of French spoken in the industrialized working class
neighbourhoods of Montreal. Associated with issues of economic
disempowerment, social hopelessness, cultural non-identity and
linguistic pollution, joual stands out from the other varieties of
Quebec French due, on the one hand, to the large number of
anglicisms and vulgarisms it contains and, on the other hand, to its
use as an aesthetic and political tool in the writings of a group of leftwing, separatist Quebec artists between 1964 and 1968, of which
Renauds Le cass instantly became and has remained
emblematic. These writers hoped at once to achieve a high degree of
social realism, to violently denounce the tragedy of the French
Canadians whose substandard speech was seen as symptomatic of
their economic and social colonization by English Canada, and to
shock the bourgeois Qubcois reader into political action. Better still,
by making joual synonymous with Quebec French in general, they
33

Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

relativized the initial sense of place it evoked east-end Montreal

so as to explicitly foreground its potential to become the symbol of all
dominated languages and a universal call-to-arms. Many
contemporary commentators criticized Renauds narrator for his
(condescending?) ability to revert at will to standard French, thereby
creating an unresolved contradiction within the novel. Conversely,
others saw in joual a subsystem of standard French rife with
innovative possibilities for creative freedom with respect to dominant
literary conventions and, as a result, a way of consolidating the then
fledgling Quebec literary institution.
It follows that, from a translational perspective, literary joual
poses formidable problems for translators in general and for EnglishCanadian translators in particular. Not only must they grapple with the
untranslatability of the anglicisms as Homel noted, English invades
French, not the other way around (1985, p. 23) , they must also
seek to convey literary jouals hopelessness, its seething inner
violence, its revolutionary political and aesthetic objectives, as well as
its intense sense of place. Translators who translate for an EnglishCanadian readership must further grapple with the ethical paradox of
translating controversial Quebec works that openly attacked the target
readers by denouncing the latters cultural and economic imperialism.
Indeed, as Homel points out, not only does joual accept English
words into its lexicon, it also distorts them once they are inside, in a
kind of sabotage action against a linguistic occupying force. These
English words better betray the domination, both economic and
linguistic, under which these people live (1985, p. 24). In Le cass,
this sabotage action is exerted by phonetic transformation (dope
becomes dpe), syntactical and lexical calques (except me
becomes except mo, broke becomes cass), as well as
morphological integration (to pitch becomes pitcher) that assimilate
the English words into French linguistic patterns; however, rather than
politically empowering the characters, such sabotage only
accentuates their sense of abjection and despair.
In the Anglo-Canadian context, literary joual thus raises an
intriguing complex of issues pertaining not only to untranslatability
and, in the case of Le cass, to retranslatability, but to nontranslatability as well. For, over and above the question of how to
translate joual, one might well ask whether joual should be translated
at all. Canadian translation scholar Kathy Mezei (1995; 1998) has
argued that translating joual into English is the ultimate betrayal, the
final, assimilative blow to a humiliated, alienated non-language
already on the verge of collapsing into English. It is tantamount to
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

forcing the Qubcois to speak white (Mezei, 1995; 1998). Mezeis

view may well be shared by many translators: to this day, Le cass is
the only joual novel of the period to have been rendered twice into
English. I will, however, leave the question of non-translation to one
side so as to better focus on the other two, for as our examples make
clear, the inherent untranslatability of joual can perhaps best be
approached by seeking a link between the context-bound linguistic,
ideological and ethical issues just alluded to and recent scholarship in
translation studies that redefines translation as a form of creative
writing, thereby ushering in what some scholars deem to be a
creative turn in the field. As Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela
Perteghella write, a creative turn in translation studies embraces
subjectivity, textuality and discursivity, selfhood and cognition,
experience and experiment (Loffredo & Perteghella, 2006, p. 11) to
which I should like to add the more culturally specific notions of
contextuality and otherness.
While untranslatability has traditionally been equated with
translational loss or failure, it can be a powerful source of creativity in
a given literary, political and sociocultural context when combined
with an ethics of translation that refuses the replication paradigm
(Folkart, 1993) based on the idea of faithfulness, loyalty, accuracy
and equivalence. The fact that faithfulness or accuracy presupposes
the superiority of the source-text, whereas equivalence implies a
relation albeit idealistic of identity, equality, congruence or parity
between source-text and target-text (Van den Broeck, 1978), is
irrelevant insofar as the result is the same, namely a mimetic
approach to the foreign work that inhibits or curbs creative input on
the part of the translator. As Michel Ballard has observed, historically
lidal conscient ou inconscient de lquivalence est le littralisme
(Ballard, 1997, p. 90). In this light, both Robitailles servile, word-forword literalism and the highly idiosyncratic, universalizing tendency of
Homels choice of equivalent adhere to the replication paradigm, thus
producing what Barbara Folkart has decried as degenerate texts
(Folkart, 1993, p. xvi) predicated on impoverishment, incoherency and
hypocrisy, as in the case of Robitaille, and on misrecognition,
normalization, illusion and expropriation, as in the case of Homel.
Most researchers associated with the creative turn in translation
studies tend to corroborate Folkarts view on literalism which, I would
argue, applies to Robitailles translation on both the linguistic and
ethical levels where, as we just saw, it promotes a particularly
insidious form of cultural and political hypocrisy notwithstanding (or
because of?) a possible ironic intention on the part of the translator.
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

There appears, however, to be some disagreement among scholars

with respect to equivalence, conventionally associated with fluid,
idiosyncratic renderings expressly designed to suppress otherness
and reinforce domestic values (Venuti, 1995). Ballard (1997), for
instance, distinguishes between fixed equivalence, based on
idiomatic choice (between two synonyms in the target language, for
example), and creative equivalence, based on innovative solutions
to source-text problems such as repetition, word play or ambiguity.
Folkart (1993) herself admits that certain forms of equivalency involve
direct writing or creativity, as opposed to rewriting or cloning. By
avoiding replication, these forms can actually improve on the source
text and transform it into a work in its own right: Appropriation is
something I believe in strongly: if you can not make the text yours,
you will not be able to make a text, period (Folkart, 1993, xvii). In this
sense, appropriation and equivalence take on more positive
connotations: it is not a question of expropriating or normalizing and
thereby misrecognizing the source-text; rather, it is a question of
producing a writerly or, better yet, a creative translation that is very
close to the stance of the author writing directly (Folkart, 1993, xxi).
Whereas literal translators are rewriters, appropriative translators are
writer-creators: instead of using equivalence to imitate, they use it to
blaz[e] paths, and bulldoz[e] new roads (Folkart, 1993, xxi). One
must, however, refrain from interpreting this to mean merely the
blazing of new linguistic or aesthetic paths. Creative equivalence
involves not only issues of innovative linguistic engineering, it also
involves the translators responsibility for the images of self and other
created by his or her writerly stance and the innovations such a
stance fosters.
Homels choice of North American street slang aptly illustrates
Ballards notion of creative equivalence and Folkarts notion of
translation as a text in its own right. As we have seen, his solutions to
the problems raised by literary jouals untranslatability attest first and
foremost to a linguistic inventiveness ostensibly designed to
compensate for the impossibility of rendering the cultural and social
dispossession inscribed in anglicisms such as pimme (pimp) or
bomme (bum) by releasing street slangs own latent verbal violence
and stigmatized status. This he does by way of a very significant
increase in the number of vulgarisms with respect to the original,7 a
tendency to translate sentences in standard French by using
substandard English,8 the frequent elision of the grammatical subject,
systematic recourse to double negatives and to the phatic use of the
pronoun you,9 and, significantly, the pointed over-translation of
several passages containing one or the other of the novels main
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

themes of violence, sex and death.10 This being said, Homels

idiosyncratic linguistic solutions are embedded in a provocative
ethical inventiveness aimed at 1) overturning the cultural assumptions
of the target reader along with the paternalistic images of Quebec
these assumptions convey, and 2) criticizing, via a potentially
offensive retranslation that implicitly engages with Robitailles initial
rendering11, dominant Anglo-Canadian translation strategies
traditionally grounded either in the radical acculturation of otherness
or, as in the case of Flat Broke and Beat, in the alienation of the
untranslatable Quebec other, deemed essential for reasons of
national unity but not quite one of us. The result, as we already saw,
is an unfamiliar, rather disturbing vision of Canadian society in the
mid-1980s that, despite its domesticating thrust, resists complete
assimilation into the target culture by paradoxically undermining
reader preconceptions and expectations.12
In conclusion, regardless of its undeniable fluidity and
idiosyncratic character, Broke City transcends both the replication
paradigm and the problem of untranslatability by virtue of the creative
rendering of the linguistic, political, aesthetic and ethical assumptions
inherent to literary joual. Indeed, jouals status as a translational case
vide can be construed as exemplifying one of the interfaces between
translation and (re)writing, insofar as its very untranslatablity requires
the translator to literally fill in the blanks it leaves in the target text
and, by so doing, reveal his or her subjectivity and agency, as well as
his or her conception of language, translation and writing. Homels
translation strategies further show the extent to which
untranslatability, and the sort of (re)writing it allows, are bound by
context-specific issues such as pre-existing representations of self
and other in the source and target cultures that act as constraints to
the creative linguistic licence untranslatability appears to foster.
Translational creativity, in spite of the possibilities for subjective
expression and stylistic liberty it connotes, must be construed and
analyzed as an eminently ethical practice that engages the
translators responsibility to otherness within a given cultural, social
and political context. To translate is to write and create en
connaissance de cause, for expressions of subjectivity are
inextricably linked to representations of otherness.

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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

Endnotes
1

The expression confrontational bilingualism is taken from Mezei (1998,

p. 239).
2
A drawing hides the first letters of ive ebec ibre, greatly reducing the slogans
political potency.
3
Further examples of literalisms and gallicisms: Its Ti-Jean had finally paid;
Moving, Philomne loves it; Ti-Jean opens the radio; What a bitchy life; We
had a little heart in the stomach; Berthe knows someone who deals in them,
these goofs.
4
The foreign, in the Canadian context, is an intranational concept. Hence the
quotation marks.
5
It should be noted that Grald Robitaille was, as he put it, a French-speaking
Quebeker [sic] in exile (Renaud, 1964b, p. 121) abroad since 1953. It is entirely
possible that his literal translation strategy was designed to give an ironic,
tongue-in-cheek albeit very conservative vision of Quebec society in the
1960s. It is also possible that the overriding presence of Gallicisms that is,
French within the English language was meant to symbolize the Quebecer as
outsider with respect to English Canada. While I cannot develop either of these
hypotheses here, I would argue that they nonetheless produce, for a unilingual
Canadian reader, linguistic and ethical effects very similar, if not identical, to the
ones I describe here.
6
Montreal is very present in the novel on both the toponymic and thematic levels.
Interestingly, Robitaille tends to translate ville by the less threatening term
town, whereas Homel uses the more topographically appropriate and, from an
Anglo-Canadian viewpoint, aggressive word city.
7
Examples: Une femme => Shit a woman; Elle avait perdu sa djobbe => So
she lost her funkin job instead; Comment qui sappelle lui calvaire! => What
the fucks his name goddammit?; Mais pas de farces plates => But no screwin
around.
8
Examples: comprend => got the picture; Ti-Jean le sait bien =>Johnny was
hip to it; Philomme a peur de mal parler => Philomena was afraid a not talkin
right; Elle sen veut => She was pissed off at herself ; Cest agreeable =>
She was eatin it right up; Il tait un peu berlu => He looked real fuckin
stunned.
9
Examples: Il y a encore => You still had; Les casss sont trop sales =>
When youre broke youre too dirty; Un bruit de clophane quon froisse =>
Like when you crumple a cigarette wrapper in your hand.
10
Example : Ti-Jean arrive souvent aprs le dpart de Philomne. Il tasse
Louise dans un coin. Louise se laisse faire. Le lecteur sattend sans doute une
description cochonne. Quil se rfre ses expriences personnelles ou dfaut
de celles-ci, quil sacre. => Johnny got there just after Philomena split. He got
Louise in a corner. Louise gave him what he wanted. The reader is probably
expecting some kind a love scene. Forget it. The reader can refer to his own
experiences, and if he doesnt have any of those, he can put his fist through a
wall.
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study

11

As Venuti has recently argued, retranslations typically justify themselves by

establishing their differences from one or more previous versions (2004, 25).
12
These results are discussed more at length in Lane-Mercier (forthcoming).

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