Notes on Translation
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
The word translation means to carry across. Presumably, a body of water.
Between 1755 and 1763, more than eleven thousand Acadians were deported by boat to British colonies. A translation of a people from one shore to another.
In 1755, my ancestor Pierrot Cormier, twenty-two at the time, was living with his wife, Nanette, in Jolicoeur, on the Isthmus of Chignecto. In early August of that year, he was summoned by the British to Fort Beauséjour. There, he was read a royal proclamation, declaring him a traitor to a distant crown, and jailed in the barracks to await deportation.
According to family lore, the night before his departure to Georgia aboard the frigate Violet, Pierrot Cormier escaped from Fort Beauséjour by wearing a dress Nanette had smuggled into his cell.
If it weren’t for that dress, my father always said, we might be speaking English and living in Louisiana, where many Acadians ended up settling.
Still, I wonder: Was Pierrot’s escape in vain if, 266 Augusts later, I am writing this in English regardless, and not in French? Does translation catch up to us all, inevitably?
Despite what it looks like, these notes aren’t written in English. This is a text stuck entre deux langues, between two shores,
a dark harbour où un navire fait escale between tongues.
***
For a long time, I experienced bilingualism as a rift within myself.
To live in two languages is to constantly translate yourself. And translation is an inherently violent process: a forceful cleaving of meaning from words, a ripping of sense from its home.
In this way, Pierrot’s imprisonment was a translation. Into the jail of English. Maison into fire, ciel into cell. The syntax of his home burning in the night.
But his escape must have been a translation as well, back into his home language. Pierrot remembering how the word lune glowed dans le ciel, le mot rosée sous ses pieds.
Fossé | Rift
What does it mean to live in the space between languages?
It is often said that a great poem cannot be translated, cannot be brought across the water, the implication being that its beauty and truth lie in its untranslatability.
What does it mean, then, for a poet to be constantly shuffling between tongues, to be constantly translating himself? To cross that border again and again? The space of translation, the moment of translation, is one of turbulence, of shifting currents, allegiances.
Sometimes, I feel like I’ve left the shore of French but haven’t reached the harbour of English yet.
Courant | Stream
To be bilingual, I think, is to discover that words are the clothes of meaning, not the skin.
In that constant translation of oneself, that perpetual back and forth, the first language becomes denaturalized, defamiliarized. It begins to gain more languageness, to become more material: something to weave and sew.
My proximity to English, my living in it, has made me feel both closer to and more estranged from French. It has made of everything a poem: seen in a new light, à la fois intime et étrange.
I am standing in the space between exile and home, entre rive and shore.
Tissu | Fabric
“Notes on Translation” will be published in Entre Rive and Shore by Dominique Bernier-Cormier, forthcoming from icehouse poetry, an imprint of Goose Lane Editions, in April 2023.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Dominique Bernier-Cormier is a Québécois/Acadian poet, translator, and teacher. His second book of poetry, Entre Rive and Shore, is forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions in April 2023 and explores what it means to live in two languages through the lens of translation, bilingual poetry, and his Acadian ancestor's escape from a British jail. He lives in Vancouver, where he teaches in a public Francophone high school. @dberniercormier on Twitter and Instagram.