by Luba Markovskaia // Translated by Ann Marie Boulanger
A few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, my family and I immigrated to Montreal. My maternal and paternal grandparents followed soon after, setting up house a few blocks away from each other, in Côte-des-Neiges. Every weekend of my…
by Eve Lemieux
translated by Cayman Rock
forthcoming from Dundurn Press, 2022
Black eyeliner, huge gold hoops in my ears, an ebony wig that falls along my jawline: I, Cleopatra Flynn, rabid sex kitten, walk up Mont-Royal pouring a bottle of bubbly right down my throat.
Step into the bar…
from École pour filles by Ariane Lessard
La Mèche, 2020
translated by Frances Pope
Ariandre
It isn’t the first time that Miss Dominique has cautioned me. She saw me push Annette and run to hide behind the shed. This is where Miss Anguish does all the maintenance work on the…
by Ève Landry
Les éditions de la maison en feu, 2020
translated by Natalia Hero
Hi sweetie
My night’s in a bad mood. The world resents me. I slow my pace. I watch my bus take off at the green light. I watch it navigate traffic. My eyes are full…
by Richard Dallaire, translated by Mary O’Connor
Éditions Alto, 2013
A few nights every month, the authorities carried out horrifying purges. They locked down neighborhoods that were hardest hit by the drying up and erected scaffolding where guillotines dispatched a portion of each superfluous individual.
“That’s a lot of work…
What does it take to be a good translator?
"You need instinct, empathy, sensitivity, passion, and dispassion. You need a thick skin, a good ear, a strong gut, and fingers that can fly like the wind. You need humility and chutzpah. You need to be ready to defend your choices, particularly your punctuation. Because people get incensed about punctuation. One would think they had been beaten about the head with semi-colons or mugged by a roving gang of em dashes. You need to meander, read comic books, read cookbooks, listen to languages you don't understand, and be an avid reader of packaging. You need to find poetry in the banal, you need to defend your punctuation some more, and you need to kill your darlings."
from Rhonda Mullins' funny, entertaining, and on-the-money contribution to "Culture in Transit: Translating the Literature of Quebec" from Véhicule Press
You recently translated The Coral Bride, your second novel by Roxanne Bouchard. What’s it like to return to an author and her characters? Does the translation get any easier?
It’s always a pleasure to dive into a Roxanne Bouchard novel and immerse myself in familiar waters. She writes with such…
by Claudine Dumont
translated by David Scott Hamilton
House of Anansi, 2015
Captive by Claudine Dumont, translated by David Scott Hamilton, comes with a hell of a twist. It’s a twist so big that you might want to consider stapling the last few pages together in case you accidentally read…
by Richard Ste-Marie
Alire, 2014
There can be so much grit between the detectives’ teeth in the crime fiction coming out of Quebec these days, it’s quite refreshing when an investigator with a touch of class comes along. Enter Detective Sergeant Francis Pagliaro of the Sûreté du Québec, a well-spoken…
Translated by Ann Marie Boulanger
It’s a summer of crushing heat and unsolved crimes. From east to west, over a mind-boggling ten million square kilometres of terrain — dotted with countless lakes, a fistful of murderers, and masses of dense, dry scrub — people have shuttered their windows, drawn dusty…
All of quebecreads.com is moving to Medium, starting this fall. | Québec Reads brings the best of Québec literature to the English-speaking world.
