To live and breathe in another language...

So I heard Nicole Brossard speak and read on Thursday night with Salina (one of the plusses of working at a University - there are opportunities for intellectual stimulation once in a while).

Here are a few things Nicole talked about that I thought were really cool:

1) In her new novel, Hier (or Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon), Nicole has interspersed one page from a found novel among the text, five times. It's completely unrelated to the rest of the text but at the same time by having it there five times, she forces the reader to read the text at least once. And the cool thing is that every time you come back to the text, you're coming at it from a different chronotope (as Bakhtin would say...and if she hasn't read Bakhtin I would be very surprised) - a different time and space. So you are always changed and therefore the text itself is never read the same way twice. Nicole compares it to being on the shore of an ocean and having a conversation, where a few words here and there are blown away by the wind. Cool.

2) Nicole's work has been translated into several languages. While she writes in French and is a native French speaker, she read to us in English from a text that had been translated by someone else. She spoke to us about the idea that you are a different person if you grow up in another language. Who, she asks, would she be, what kind of a woman would she be, if she had grown up in English, Italian, Spanish? For each language has a different way of breathing, and of being...

I have grown up sandwiched in between Canada's two solitudes - French, and English. Never completely at home in French while surrounded by a culture that is predominantly English, and where my mother tongue (the language first spoken to me by my mother) always felt like an uncomfortably big sweater where the sleeves had been rolled up. And at the same time, I am never completely whole in English alone - I feel as though a part of me is missing somehow when I live my life entirely in that language. So how do I then construct my subjectivism, in the spaces between these two languages? How do I breathe in this space between two silences?

3) Three, three...what was three again? Well, Nicole read some of her journal writings from being in Japan in 1982 - Tokyo, and Kyoto. And there are places in her narrative that I swear could have been written by me when I wrote Yume. The same sense of being lost in translation, so the saying goes. The same sense of becoming entirely wordless, and of being lost in a culture where holy sites and neon lights are cramped together. Where the sublime is nestled in the commonplace...weird...

How neat to be able to write every day...To get up in the morning and have words sew the spaces in between your breaths. To construct a world out of words...