In The Keeper’s Daughter, names – and changes of name, for the uncertainty of identity is a theme of the novel – are important. In real life, names are labels that serve to identify people, places, and things; in fiction, however, names are chosen by the author, and sometimes they carry a second meaning corresponding to a trait of the fictional character or place. However, it is rarely appropriate, or even possible, to translate names, so that in such cases something is inevitably “lost in translation.”
The Quebec village on which the story of Rose Brouillard centres was originally called Sainte-Marie, but it has been renamed Sainte-Marée-de-l’Incantation. “Marie,” the French name for the Virgin Mary, is replaced by marée (“tide”). The name would almost certainly remind a Québécois reader of Marie de l’Incarnation, a Ursuline nun and missionary to Aboriginal peoples in seventeenth-century New France, whose name has been given to many streets and buildings, though not to any real Quebec village. In the novel, the new name is bestowed by Plumules Nord, the company that has transformed the village into a tourist attraction and invented the bogus ritual of the “incantation.” Although plumule signifies “down feather,” the verb plumer (“to pluck”) also means “to cheat,” suggesting there is something not quite above board about the firm’s activities. A motel on the way to Sainte-Marée is called “Motel Pèlerins” – perhaps encouraging tourists to think of themselves as pilgrims (pèlerins) and of Sainte-Marée as a genuine holy site – which of course it is not.
Where the characters are concerned, Rose Brouillard’s last name is particularly apt for someone often lost in the fog of her dementia, for brouillard means “fog.” A major portion of the story is told through the eyes and camera lens of “Dorothée,” a young woman of Haitian origin, whose real name we never learn. In Rose’s mind she has become confused with the women of colour who appear in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire: one, whom the poet knew on the island of Réunion, during a voyage to the Indian Ocean (hence “the African girl”), is evoked in a poem called “La Belle Dorothée”; another was Baudelaire’s mistress, Jeanne Duval, whom the poet compares to a sensuous cat: Rose also refers to “Dorothée” as “Baudelaire’s cat.” Monsieur Vignault’s three female cousins are named Flore (the French name for the Roman goddess of flowers), Marguerite (“Daisy”), and Jacinthe (“Hyacinth”), which explains the whimsical reference to them as “the three flowers” and a “floral chorus.”
Some brief explanations of other aspects of Francophone culture evoked in the novel may be useful.
“Marianne” (page 35) is a personification of the French revolutionary ideal of liberty, often identified with the figure in the famous painting by Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. The Origin of the World is a painting by Gustave Courbet which depicts the lower abdomen and genitals of a reclining female nude. A Country without Hats (page 47) is a novel by Dany Laferrière (born 1953), a Quebec writer of Haitian origin, while Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944) is a classic of Haitian literature. Some traditional Quebec and French dishes with no equivalents in Anglophone cuisine are mentioned (page 54): cipaille (a Québécois multi-layered pie generally made with a variety of meats, sometimes including game); bouilli (a stew of beef, pork, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and so on); and ratatouille (a stew of eggplant, zucchini, and tomatoes). Professor Calculus (page 77) is a character in the Tintin comic books. Marc Aurèle Fortin (page 85) was a Quebec painter (1888–1970) whose work is somewhat reminiscent of the Group of Seven. André Mathieu (page 93) was a Quebec pianist and composer (1929–1968): a child prodigy, he gave his first public recital in a Montreal hotel a few days after his sixth birthday. Two of Baudelaire’s poems are quoted: four lines (in translation) of “Une charogne,” which describes the rotting corpse of an animal (page 81), and a line from “Invitation au voyage”: luxe, calme, et volupté – “luxury, calm, and sensual pleasure” (page 122). Lines from two traditional French folksongs have been translated: “La belle Françoise” (page 75), and “À la claire fontaine” (page 110). The reference to a song about swallows (page 74) probably refers to another folksong, “Ah toi, belle hirondelle,” in which a swallow carries a message from a young woman to her absent lover.
We hope that, thanks to this information, for readers of The Keeper’s Daughter a little less will be lost in the translation.