the way the translator senses her way through the text as she recreates – indeed rewrites – the links and drifts that are (mis)aligned in the original.
Brossard has also inspired decades of what we’re calling transcollaborations – with Fred Wah in the transcreated ‘If Yes Seismal/Si Sismal’ and Mauve with Daphne Marlatt, both included in this book – where original and translation are offered together, face to face on the page. These two works offer examples of translation as a transformative reading practice. In Mauve, for example, Brossard has written a short poetic sequence in French that Marlatt converts into English as a creative counterpart. It is less useful here to think in terms of original and translation, or source and target text, than it is to think in terms of two languages, two minds converting the electrical impulses of language, as Marlatt herself observes in her essay on the work: ‘Translating Mauve became a remarkable illustration of this process, a reading of the depths of the drift, a writing running counter to it, so that i felt as if, in the process, my own cerebral cortext were being marked or written on. Mauve stands as a commentary on the act of reading and especially the act of translating’.18
Then there are the texts that walk across the tightrope of translation and straddle the line between translation and something else. We conceive of these as creative responses in an attempt to capture the creative and discursive engagements. Included here is Charles Bernstein’s response to Brossard’s self-translated piece ‘Polynésie des yeux/Polynesya of the Eyes,’ entitled ‘Polynesian Days,’ where familiar words and turns of phrases from the originals appear in drifts and collusions that capitalize on polyphonic and poetic inventiveness. Beyond Bernstein, Bronwyn Haslam’s ‘Silk Font 1,’ an anagrammatic translation of Brossard’s French prose poem ‘Soft Link 1,’ seemed an essential addition to the reader. Here is a text that operates with the (almost) impossible constraint of only using the same letters found in the original. In many ways, Haslam’s text captures something of the importance of poiesis to translation and, similarly, to Brossard’s work.
Mauve desert, mauve moods, mauve modes of movement. That’s the thing about horizons – we move ourselves to their shimmering potential. Desiring, we cross generations, inhabit cities and horizons beyond them, and, if we are fortunate, we translate to encounter one another. We confront the wall of fire. We defend them too. We sprawl ourselves across them. We traverse urban sprawl that compresses the scene of a kiss, in Brossard’s novel French Kiss, for instance, with simultaneous scenes across Montreal, as though they could all be held together in the space between two ardent mouths opening for each other, or two generations, or ten, all the mouths open for each other.
FUTURES
In a time where the question of who and which bodies matter, we are again struck with the realization that Brossard has insisted on multiple bodies and on creating space for bodies both known and yet to be known. Language has changed in the half-century during which she has been writing, yes, and we have made some editorial decisions to address those changes in language. Pronouns, especially, have been necessarily oxygenated. So too, have terms of identification shifted. Language will and must continue to shift to accommodate our multiple lived realities. Or, as Brossard puts it, ‘writing is making oneself visible. To show all forms of experiences.’19 When we organized the section we named ‘Futures,’ we were thinking of the ways in which Brossard’s work faces horizons, which open outward. We were thinking, too, of the ways in which today’s future becomes tomorrow’s archive.
There are multiple bodies present here too, in the editorial and curatorial gestures of this reader, and indeed in the crafting of this introduction – not to mention you, dear reader, who have been very much on our mind. So, when we say that Nicole Brossard’s work invites the reader to see (and understand that you are creating) the future in the present, it is a cautiously hopeful wager, because perhaps now more than ever that present is so multidimensional – and so easily co-opted and complicit. The present offers a space of anticipation, for the present vibrates in language and vibrates differently for each of us. It is there, in the vibrating present of language, that a space opens in the text. We are reminded of what Nicole Brossard shared with us while we were sitting in her dining room in the fall of 2019: ‘Reading turns us on. It’s mysterious, but we start to understand how literature works […] and we also discover what’s most interesting about human beings. By meandering in language, as in life, a whole world becomes available.’20
Our meeting took place on the day of the massive climate strikes across Canada. Half a million people gathered in Montreal. We had each attended before meeting at Brossard’s house to talk about the possibilities and pleasures of thinking together through and across languages – and generations, Geneviève’s baby in the arms of Brossard’s partner as we wound down from our work. To meander in language, to be turned on by the mysterious power of reading, to be interested in what each person was saying in the moment, and then to try to record it here for you to read – this feels future-oriented for us. This feels vital.
The question of address too, has seemed vital, and has kept us company throughout the work of curation. Who is this ‘we’ hailed, sometimes, in Brossard’s writing? Who is called – then, now, in the future – by the shifting and often recurrent signifiers of woman, of lesbian, of poet? What if, as readers, we chafe against some of these signifiers, or feel adrift off the coast of them? Sometimes, the poet offers us some signposts.21 Sometimes these are satisfying maps for a reader. Sometimes, they leave us wanting more. Desiring conversation. Can or should we as readers infer collective subjectivity into the poet’s use of the singular pronoun ‘I’? Can the individual hail collectives, both imagined and on the edge of what is possible to imagine at a given moment in history?
We are in the midst of climate catastrophe. Abuses of power rage on both global and local levels. Misogyny and fascism feel ever more present. As we finalize this introduction, the rail system in Canada has come to halt by cross-country blockades in support of the Wet’suwet’en. What is the power of poetry, and the possibilities of future-oriented collectivity in the face of these realities? Again, we turn to Brossard, who figures the work of writing as a quest for necessary pleasure in the midst of upheaval and turmoil. Brossard writes, ‘For my part, I have always made writing a place of pleasure, of quest, a space of dangerous intensity, a space for turbulence having its own dynamic.’22 We are living in turbulent times, but there has also always been turbulence at any given moment on our planet. Let’s imagine that getting out in front of turbulence, of advancing a teleology of desire – for jouissance, for pleasure, for the ‘dreaming parts of us’ – is possible, even political.23 If we imagine that the time we spend together on these pages matters, then we are already facing new horizons. Brossard’s body of work is one that the reader wants to come back to. That readerly return is a guiding force of our editorial curation here. The sensual dimension of her narratives, in poetry as well as prose, welcome this. It is itself about the measure of desire, the measure of writing. It is easy to become infatuated, to admire the way Brossard’s sentences work beyond a single vanishing point, how they multiply desire. It’s a question of movement as much as energy, a question of the (d)rift between the writing, the written, and the sensations that gather there. Pleasure is never singular. Never over nor complete. Rattling language to multiply pleasure, there is a refusal to have pleasure denied.
The Brossardian text has the capacity, a clarity, for drilling down into things, for illuminating what’s inside the sheath or shell of language, while being, at the same time, never straightforward. Opening vistas and spaces to inhabit, Brossard’s poetry and prose offer a radiant gesture, a kind of activism that is working in a different register by refocusing the narrative or by role modelling a new trajectory, a space of clarity, of energy – another way of being. That’s part of what’s so interesting about Brossard’s feminist poetics – that by excavating language in order to seek to uncover or more fully understand the history carried within the frame of a word, her poetry and prose are also always interrupting our expectations,
