McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

Translating Montreal

Robert Lalonde, président du jury, Grand Prix de la Ville de Montréal:

"Une stupéfiante lettre d’amour adressée une Montréal bilingue et multiculturelle, caravansérail de toutes les illusions, de tous les reves et de toutes les espérances. Avec la nonchalance apparente d’une marcheuse infatigable, dotée d’un sens de l’observation sourcillant, Sherry Simon emprunte les passages secrets reliant et séparant l’une et l’autre langue, éloignant et rapprochant le Mile-End et le plateau Mont-royal, en suivant les traces de ses plus grands écrivains-traducteurs. En vagabondage   la fois érudit, ludique et clairvoyant, et qui ouvre d’étonnantes perspectives sur ce que Simon nomme “the proximate strangeness”, “the intimate otherness” de ces deux cultures, qui peut- tre, au fond, n’en font qu’une. Kaléidoscope des passes, couloirs et défilés qui   la fois distinguent et rassemblent les deux communautés, Translating Montreal est avant tout un livre migrant, savant et solaire, qui fait du Montréalais d’aujourd’hui un citoyen   l’identité enfin ré-imaginée."

Pat Donnelly, Montreal Gazette:

"Simon said she was delighted to see Leroux, a fellow academic, win. "Georges Leroux is a dear, good friend of mine. I was just thrilled to be a finalist." Her book, also nominated for a QWF award, garnered several other nominations and won the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures' Gabrielle Roy Prize for literary criticism (in English) last year."

Translating Montreal Awarded 2006 Gabrielle Roy Prize

Gabrielle Roy Prize 2006
Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures
Press Release
May 31, 2007

For immediate release

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) is pleased to award the Gabrielle Roy prize (anglophone section), which each year honours the best work of literary criticism published in English, to Sherry Simon, for Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, published by McGill-Queen's University Press. Of the eighteen books submitted to the jury by presses across the country, the work of Sherry Simon distinguished itself by its originality, scope, and interdisciplinary rigour. Simon's exhaustive analysis of linguistic and cultural transfers in Montreal's writing communities is informed by her keen understanding of the spatial, political, and cultural dynamics of the city, its history, and its intersection of languages. By examining various "moments of translation," Simon demonstrates how these communities speak for and to each other in a work that historicizes the changing face of Montreal, from a colonial city neatly divided by the English and French solitudes, to the "reconquest" of the city by the emerging Quebecois identity during the Quiet Revolution, and finally, to the inter-cultural and inter-lingual cosmopolitan city of today. Simon chronicles the first "crossings" of the linguistic and cultural divide that was Montreal in the early 1960's between the Partis Pris writers and Anglo writers such as Malcolm Reid and F.R. Scott. A.M. Klein's influence is also crucial to an understanding of Montreal, and the "confluence of languages" in his poetry is brilliantly analysed in chapters dedicated to the city's sizeable body of Jewish writing. These, Simon argues, initiated the city's "culture of translation" which would have influence for decades to come. Simon then examines the inheritors of this culture of translation through the writing of Gail Scott, Jacques Brault, Nicole Brossard, and Erin Moure, among many others. She also provides a penetrating analysis of the litterature migrante movement in the 1980's, including writers such as Emile Olivier, Marco Micone, and Dany Laferriere. Simon argues that the points of contact between communities in this unique city offer up productive and stimulating tensions which emerge in the rich writing of Montreal, and her engaging, lively, and personal work is a testament to and example of this productive tension.

The jury has also voted to give an honourable mention to Paula Ruth Gilbert's Violence and the Female Imagination, published by McGill-Queen's University Press. Gilbert's comprehensive and detailed work examines representations of female cruelty and violence in recent Quebec fiction by women.

Renseignements:
Domenic Beneventi
President du jury (section anglophone), ALCQ/ACQL
Departement des lettres et communications, University de Sherbrooke
domenic.beneventi@gmail.com