Patricia Godbout

Linguistic and cultural space “in translation”: North Hatley

In Cities in Translation, Sherry Simon studies cities “in translation,” such as Barcelona, Calcutta, Montreal and Trieste. In a similar vein, I would like to examine the cultural and intellectual space of translation that prevailed in the village of North Hatley for several decades. Bringing together numerous artists, writers, historians, politicians and translators, such as F. R. Scott, Hugh MacLennan, Mason Wade, Sheila Fischman and Gérald Godin, this vacation retreat became a site of exchange where various literary and cultural projects were born and took shape, and where many questions, particularly different visions of Canadian and Québécois literature, were debated. It is no coincidence that many of the players who took part in this “summer theatre” were also translators. I would like to foreground their contribution to this literary and cultural microcosm through a reading of various texts of the period.

Keywords: North Hatley, cultural and literary exchanges, translation

Biography

Patricia Godbout is a Professor in the Department of Literature and Communications at the Université de Sherbrooke and President of the Canadian Translation Studies Association. She holds a PhD in French Studies from the Université de Sherbrooke and has many years of experience in the field of literary translation in Canada, both as a translator and a researcher. She has also participated in numerous conferences and has contributed, as a member of the Scientific Committee, to the program of Transfiction 3: The Fictions of Translation. Her most recent work Les traducteurs fictifs et les questions de langue et d’identité dans la littérature québécoise contemporaine is forthcoming.