— Joseph Pivato
Antonio D’Alfonso has been using the practice of self-translation for most of his writing career. In the history of world literature there are several examples of authors who practice forms of self-translation; they write in one language and then translate the text into another. Some well-known examples are Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino and the Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The Canadian writer who lives in Paris, Nancy Huston, makes it part of her writing practice to compose in French and then rewrite the novel into English. The results are mixed: Her French novels often win awards while her English novels are frequently not well received by critics and readers. In her book, Writing It Twice, Sara Kippur laments that, “self-translation continues to be described as neglected, misunderstood, and feared. Scholars and writers display a certain cautious ambivalence about self-translation that seems suggestive of the ways that self-translation articulates itself both as a literary practice and as a scholarly field, from a position of instability.” (14)
Almost by accident Antonio D’Alfonso has ventured into the minefield of self-translation as a tool to explore and experiment with his own writing practice. D’Alfonso is a bilingual artist who lives in the multilingual city of Montreal and so is constantly dealing with both English and French and translating back and forth on a daily basis. For D’Alfonso, however, his linguistic condition is more complicated than two languages. Even the term ‘bilingual’ is not sufficient since D’Alfonso speaks and writes in three languages: English, French and Italian. However, he identifies most closely with the term ‘bilingual poet’ since his greatest success has come from his poetry, especially his French poetry for which he has won many literary awards. In his own writing he has experimented by composing first in one language, such as French, and then translating into another. He has also written in Italian and in his parents’ Molisan dialect, Guglionesano, and then translated into English or French or both to see how this affects the text he is working on at the time. In The Other Shore he explains that his writing is always a translation from one language to another:
Already a transformation occurs:
from Guglionesano, I must translate
into Italian. When I write I translate.
Sometimes no translation occurs. The
words or phrases come directly into
English or French. A linkage of differences. (109)
To the double perspective of English and French D’Alfonso adds the third one of Italian; not just the Italian of the immigrant, but the Italian with 1,000 years of culture from the Mediterranean. We see this in his polemical poems such as “Where Do I begin?” and “To Maintain Your Identity,” and also “The Loss of a Culture” (Other Shore 58–60). In one poem he asks, “The Italian culture: what does it mean to be Italian today if you live outside Italy?” (75) As part of this identity search there are many Italian sentences, phrases and words in The Other Shore (1986). In contrast, there are very few Italian words in D’Alfonso’s earlier books, Black Tongue (1983) and Queror (1979).
To try to understand the problems of identity and the roles that languages and self-translation play, D’Alfonso has also experimented with poetic forms such as prose-poems and poetic novels. Poetic experiments make translation even more difficult than it already is. A brave soul, D’Alfonso has translated into English the French poetry of Philippe Haeck, Stefan Psenak, Louise Dupré, Paul Bélanger, José Acquelin, Roger des Roches and Claudine Bertrand. D’Alfonso also translated the poet Pasquale Verdicchio into French and some Quebec poets into Italian. He originally wrote Avril ou l’anti-passion (1990) in French and then re-wrote this novel in English as Fabrizio’s Passion (1995), which was subsequently translated into Italian by Antonello Lombardi. “When I write I translate,” D’Alfonso maintains.
We also see this rich diversity in his polemical essay collection In Italics (1996). The different essays express opinions on a variety of issues that affect Canadian authors and publishers: cultural appropriation, minority identity, English language writing in Quebec and funding of small presses. During his time in Montreal as a writer, editor and professional translator in the 1980s, D’Alfonso epitomized the minority artist in Quebec caught in the maze of French nationalist and federalist politics and culture.
The political dimension in this volume is so all-pervasive that we begin to take it for granted, like the intrigue in a spy novel. It seems that writing in French is sometimes not enough to be accepted in Quebec. And, like Nancy Huston, he asks: “Is writing in English sufficient to be accepted in the rest of Canada?” This political reading is the subtext in his essay “A Literary Culture in Search of a Tradition,” where he examines the work of other Quebec writers of Italian background: Fulvio Caccia, Marco Micone, Mary Melfi and Filippo Salvatore.
D’Alfonso has gradually adopted the strategy of selftranslation as a means of exploring his own ambiguous linguistic condition in Quebec: a bilingual/trilingual writer and a fragmented identity. The translation of his work from French to English creates a constant displacement from one literary space to another. Self-translation blurs the traditional literary boundaries between the French traditions and the English. It also blurs the lines between the “original” work and the “translation” as a mere copy. D’Alfonso’s The Other Shore was translated into L’Autre rivage.
His lament in the opening note — “This book of broken verses, broken thoughts, about broken feelings. This, a notebook without a beginning, without an end, only a flowing towards being, a growing; contradictions and explanations” (7) — is echoed in the note to the French version: “Ce livre de vers brisés, de pensées brisés, a propose de sentiments brisés.” (5) The verses and thoughts are fragmented into different languages in the poet’s head. Is it necessary to read the two books to bring them all together?
From this we can surmise that when D’Alfonso composes he is working together in two languages or more. Because he is writing parts in French and then other parts in English and then translating the passages into French, how do you determine the language of the original text? What does this practice mean for the author’s own understanding of, and intentions for the text? Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism may be useful to explain the many levels of dialogic connections in the process of self-translation in the case of Antonio D’Alfonso’s work. Bakhtin explains that many literary texts are dialogic when the voice of the author is in dialogue or in argument with another voice (or voices) in the text. He calls this the double-voiced word, a conceptual tool which we can use to explain dialogism in the self-translation process involving two languages, in effect two voices in the same text or two sister texts. Let us consider some brief examples of this in D’Alfonso’s poems.
In The Other Shore he dedicated the poem, “Roma” to Mary di Michele:
Roma. Rain. Roaming along
Lungotevere. Past midnight.
Under an umbrella too small for two. (131)
The French version of these opening lines is different:
Roma. Sous la pluie.
Errand par le Lungotevere. Après minuit.
Sous un parapluie trop petit pour deux. (102)
The difference is the alliteration, “Roma. Rain. Roaming . . .” which is repeated four times in the English poem. Playing with the sound of Roma and roaming is not possible in French and so the sense of slow ponderous movement in the heavy rain late at night is not as well reproduced by the missing onomatopoeia. Here D’Alfonso is in a dialogue with Mary di Michele as they recall the rainy night in Rome. This dialogic dimension is maintained in the French: “Voulant tellement compredre le passé qu’on nous a volé.” (102)
Sometimes the two voices are in argument or in denial as D’Alfonso explains in a note at the end of his 2014 poem collection: “The Irrelevant Man is different from Un ami, un nuage (Le Noroit, 2013) . . . One is not the translation of the other. Poems get written in various languages. I remember one being written in French first and a second in English and a third in Italian.” (133) To my reading, though, they are sister texts. This dialogism is particular to polyphonic texts and to self-translated texts which become sister texts engaged in a dialogue with the reader. The two texts are also engaged in a dialogue with each other as well as with other texts in the different languages of readers. The phenomenon becomes a multicultural self-dialogue spread over a number of texts by the same author, in this case Antonio D’Alfonso.
In Un ami, un nuage we find the French version of “Italian Alphabet,” a poem which begins each line with a letter from the Italian alphabet. The French poem captures more completely the conceptions of the English version. As such it is a counterpoint to the abstractness of the poem in The Irrelevant Man (125) and an opening to Italian:
A force d’épier l’Horizon
Bien plus loin que
Cette vision qui nous
Donne à voir peu, nous
Eliminons les déjà trop petites. (119)
These two sister texts continue the dialogue-argument begun 28 years earlier with The Other Shore and with other texts such as Mary di Michele’s “Rome Wasted in the Rain,” a poem for Antonio D’Alfonso, from her collection Immune to Gravity (1986):
I find my way through this city
like a woman through the arms
of a married lover. (117)
The poetry of Antonio D’Alfonso is a very good example of Bakhtin’s dialogism and demonstrates the many levels that can be found in self-translation.
In both his poetry and his essays D’Alfonso is trying to create a dialogue among the various cultural groups of Canada: English, French, Italian, Hispanic, etc. An example of this is his polemical book of conversations with poet Pasquale Verdicchio entitled Duologue (1998). But is this mission bound to fail, given the intransigence and political positions of many artists in Canada? D’Alfonso’s own diverse and often disputed positions here make writing an essay on him difficult. How do we separate the writer from the editor and the editor from the translator?
In 2005 D’Alfonso brought out Gambling with Failure, a collection of essays that continues the arguments and conflicts over the nature and failure of Italian culture in Italy and abroad. He decries the conservative attitudes of Italian-Canadian communities and the lack of vision of our cousins in Italy. D’Alfonso contrasts this with the vitality of the arts and politics in Quebec. The “failure” in the book title refers to many failures in italic culture. It is significant to note that the Alberta-born Nancy Huston laments her own problems with translation and languages as she confesses in her essay, “False Bilingualism,” which she translated from her French in 2002.
In his seminal essay “Grounds for Translation,” poet Doug Jones explains that all Canadian writers want to be heard, not just by their own language community but also by those from other languages and cultures. That is why we translate, he argues. (84) It is for the same reason, I believe, that D’Alfonso has translated the work of many other writers. He believes in the process of translating Canadian works from French into English and vice versa. He has backed this belief by getting books by Quebec authors translated into English and then publishing them through his former press, Guernica Editions. There are well over 100 titles of translated works in the Guernica catalogue of 2009.
In his often quoted poem “Babel,” D’Alfonso explores the confusion of growing up in the many languages of Montreal. Out of the cacophony of despair the poem ends with a glimmer of hope, a possible direction for the future:
Dio where shall I be demain
(trop vif) qué puedo
saber yo spero che la terra be mine. (57)
This is the context for reading the original works of Antonio D’Alfonso, the self-translation, the languages, the different sounds, the images of contrasts and the dream of harmony. The multi-language work of Antonio D’Alfonso is what has inspired me over the years to produce academic essays on the problems of translation. My first article, “Constantly Translating: The Challenge for Italian-Canadian Writers,” appeared in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature in 1987. I returned to the topic in my essay, “Translation as Existence,” in Echo: Essays on Other Literatures in 1994. I spoke about translation at literary conferences and referenced it in many articles. When I edited The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing (1998), I contributed some of the translations. This process was repeated when I edited Rina Del Nin Cralli’s book, From Friuli: Poems in Friulan with English Translations (2015). At a Vancouver conference, Kathy Mezei invited me to contribute an article to the book, Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture (2014). My essay became “1978: Language Escapes: Italian-Canadian Authors Write in an Official Language and Not in Italiese.” On August 23, 2016, I was the external examiner for a doctoral thesis at the University of Ottawa at the School of Translation and Interpretation. The successful doctoral candidate was Tiziana Nannavecchia and her topic was: “Translating Italian-Canadian Immigrant Writers into Italian.” This original thesis inspired me to return once more to translation and self-translation in the work of Antonio D’Alfonso and other Canadian writers like Nancy Huston.
The major part of the debate over the politics of culture in Canada revolves around questions about the nature of our national literature. Can Canadian literature be easily separated into English and French writing? Is there one national literature or two? What is the role of translation? Is there a place for ethnic minority writing? Where is the place for the writing by First Nations people in either the official languages or native languages? Antonio D’Alfonso and the other ethnic minority writers in Quebec came of age as these cultural debates where increasing during the rise of the Parti Québécois in the 1970s. They became part of the debate: Were they going to write in French or in English? Writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other artists were being forced to choose sides.
This is the cultural and political context that helps us to understand the development of Antonio D’Alfonso and other bilingual writers.
The English university Loyola (later Concordia) and the French Université de Montréal that D’Alfonso attended were playing their respective roles in these cultural and political debates. As a bilingual student he absorbed the ideas and the zeitgeist of those years. In the disputes over the languages in Canadian literature, l’Université de Sherbrooke, south of Montreal, became a centre of innovation in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1962 Ronald Sutherland, then Head of the English program at the new Université de Sherbrooke, proposed a degree program leading to a Master of Arts in Comparative Canadian Literature. Against opposition and controversy this program was later established and eventually to thrive. By the 1970s Sutherland’s program was influencing the study of Canadian writing in some other Canadian universities.
In his 1971 book, Second Image: Comparative Studies in Quebec/Canadian Literature, Sutherland presented some of the results of his seminars with the graduate students at Sherbrooke. In the 1970s Sutherland gave many lectures across Canada promoting his comparative approach to Canadian writing. In 1977 he brought out his second book, The New Hero: Essays in Comparative Quebec/ Canadian Literature which elaborated and defended his ideas in the first book that through parallel analyses of major texts we find that anglophone and francophone literatures share many themes and structures. It was a revolutionary idea at this time of the “two solitudes.”
I call this phenomenon The Sherbrooke School of Comparative Canadian Literature because of the widespread influence which this institution had, and still has. It is important to briefly trace some of these links. The study of Canadian/Quebec literature included other pioneers in Quebec: Gilles Marcotte with Une Littérature qui se fait (1962), Clément Moisan with L’Âge de la littérature canadienne (1969), D.G. Jones with Butterfly on Rock (1970), and Antoine Sirois with Montréal dans le roman canadien (1969). Both Jones and Sirois were teaching at Sherbrooke and were part of the new M.A. programme. Philip Stratford of l’Université de Montréal published articles promoting the parallels between Canada’s two literatures. His former student, Larry Shouldice taught at Sherbrooke and published Contemporary Quebec Criticism (1979). All were involved with the Sherbrooke publication of Ellipse, which was devoted to francophone and anglophone poems and their translation into the other language. This is the translation tradition which Antonio D’Alfonso inherited in 1980 when he began to publish Quebec writers in English.
In 1978 D’Alfonso founded Guernica Editions as a bilingual publishing house in Montreal. In 1982 he co-founded the trilingual magazine, Vice Versa, along with French language writers Fulvio Caccia and Lamberto Tassinari. In 1983 with Caccia he edited the anthology Quêtes: Textes d’auteurs italo-québécois, which demonstrated the creative energy that was coming from French culture in Quebec.
From Quebec the influence of the Sherbrooke School began to spread across Canada.
In 1969 one academic, Mary Hamilton, and one grad student, Francis Macri moved from Sherbrooke to the University of Alberta to pursue PhDs in Comparative Literature and brought these Sherbrooke ideas and approaches to Edmonton. They were later joined by Barbara Belyea, another graduate student from Sherbrooke. They encouraged their Alberta professor, E.D. Blodgett, to go to Sherbrooke as a visiting professor for a term.
In addition, many of the academics from Sherbrooke were invited to give lectures in Alberta. I attended many of these lectures and came under the influence of the Sherbrooke school. In 1979 an issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature was devoted to the practical and theoretical questions of the comparative study of Canadian and Quebec literatures. This issue included contributions from the Sherbrooke and Montreal people named above and David Hayne, a French professor from the University of Toronto. In 1982 E.D. Blodgett published Configuration: Essays on the Canadian Literatures, a collection of essays which promoted the comparative study of Canadian writing. At that time another Sherbrooke student, John Lennox, went to York University to teach Canadian literature and published articles on Quebec authors. At York he met Barbara Godard, a bilingual feminist scholar who had studied at the Université de Montréal with Philip Stratford. Godard co-founded the bilingual feminist journal, Tessara, with Kathy Mezei, Daphne Marlatt and Gail Scott. Tessera played a key role in promoting dialogue between experimental women writers in Quebec and English-Canada. Godard contributed essays to Guernica essay collections and published her translations of Nicole Brossard’s Picture Theory, and Lovhers and France Théoret’s Girls Closed In with Guernica Editions. Italian-Canadian writer Doré Michelut published her seminal essay “Coming to Terms with the Mother Tongue” in Tessera 6 (1989).
In 1979–80 Sutherland was a visiting professor at the University of Calgary which later hired Barbara Belyea and Estelle Dansereau, another Ph.D. graduate from Alberta. Thus, the comparative approach was also taken to Calgary and reflected in some literature courses. When I completed my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1977 under the supervision of E.D. Blodgett, I was hired at the new Athabasca University, which had hired Mary Hamilton. She brought the Sherbrooke perspective to her new courses in Canadian Literature which included several novels by Gabrielle Roy in English translation and D.G. Jones’ poem collection, Under the thunder the flowers light up the sky (1977).
In 1983 my new course in Comparative Canadian Literature included Sutherland’s book, Second Image and many Quebec books in English translation. Our Canadian literature courses began to adopt several texts produced by D’Alfonso’s Guernica Editions.
The Sherbrooke School of Comparative Canadian Literature influenced all my critical work and literary studies. Ronald Sutherland’s books, Second Image and The New Hero, and Doug Jones’s Butterfly on Rock promoted a comparative approach to the study of Canadian writing. The rationale behind this was that English language writing in Canada could be better understood in comparison and contrast to French language writing. Gabrielle Roy, Ringuet and Anne Hébert were translated into English and studied in Canadian Literature courses across the country. When I published the article “Eight Approaches to Canadian Literary Criticism,” in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in 1979 and argued for a comparative approach and bilingual knowledge, I was directly influenced by Sutherland and Jones.
My first academic article in the journal Canadian Literature (1982) was on Godbout’s nouveau roman, an English reading of a French separatist novel. When I began to work on Italian-Canadian writing, it was natural for me to take a comparative approach since these writers were working in English, French and Italian. All of us quickly realized that Antonio D’Alfonso, as a writer and translator, epitomized this new phenomenon in Canadian writing. In 1985, I published Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian-Canadian Writing with Guernica Editions. Various references to this work have suggested that it influenced the critical study of other ethnic minority writing across Canada. In this collection my first essay “Ethnic Writing and Comparative Canadian Literature” acknowledges my debt to Sutherland and Blodgett (17, 22). In 1994 I brought out Echo: Essays on Other Literatures and continued to promote this comparative approach to these new literatures.
The Sherbrooke School has influenced a younger generation of scholars, academics and writers as well. Jo-Anne Elder completed her Ph.D. in comparative Canadian literature at Sherbrooke and later became the editor of Ellipse at the University of New Brunswick. Elder published her translations of Gerald LeBlanc’s Moncton Mantra, Herménégilde Chiasson’s Lifedream and Claude Forand’s In the Claws of the Cat with Guernica Editions. In 1993 Lianne Moyes completed her Ph.D. (a bilingual project) under Barbara Godard at York University and now teaches Canadian literature at the Université de Montréal. Moyes edited Gail Scott: Essays on Her Works (Guernica). In 1995 Marino Tuzi completed his Ph.D. on Italian-Canadian fiction under the supervision of John Lennox at York University.
In 1998 Licia Canton completed her Ph.D. on identity questions in Italian-Canadian novels at l’Université de Montréal working under Lianne Moyes. In 2002 Canton edited The Dynamics of Cultural Exchange, a collection on Italian-Canadian writing. In 2004 she co-edited with Domenic Beneventi and Lianne Moyes, Adjacencies: Minority Writing in Canada. When Monica Stellin completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1998 on the Italian literature of immigration, she was able to rely on a number of Guernica books. This approach is also exemplified in the publications of Domenic Beneventi who has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from l’Université de Montréal, and went on to teach at Sherbrooke.
In 1995 an issue of the journal Ellipse, from Sherbrooke, was devoted to two Guernica writers: Fulvio Caccia in French and Mary Melfi in English. This is recognition of the legacy made by D’Alfonso in Quebec literature and the study of Canadian literature across Canada. At Athabasca University courses in Comparative Canadian Literature have used many Guernica books over the past three decades.
This brief essay is a celebration of the cultural, academic and political impact for the writing, translation work and publications of Antonio D’Alfonso, a writer caught between two worlds. The debate about the nature of Canadian literature still continues, and D’Alfonso has done his considerable part to contribute to this discourse.
Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas, 1981.
Blodgett, E.D. Configuration: Essays on the Canadian Literatures. Toronto: ECW, 1982.
Caccia, Fulvio. & Antonio D’Alfonso, eds. Quêtes: Textes d’auteurs italo-québécois. Montreal: Guernica, 1983.
Canton, Licia. Ed. The Dynamics of Cultural Exchange. Montreal: Cusmano, 2002.
D’Alfonso, Antonio. Black Tongue. Montreal: Guernica, 1983.
____. Queror. Montreal: Guernica, 1979.
____. L’Autre rivage. Montreal: Éditions du Noroît, 1999.
____. The Other Shore. Montreal: Guernica, 1986.
____. Fabrizio’s Passion. Toronto: Guernica, 1995.
____. Un ami, un nuage. Montreal: Editions du Noroît, 2013.
____. The Irrelevant Man. Toronto: Guernica, 2014.
Di Michele, Mary. Immune to Gravity. McClelland & Stewart, 1986.
Huston, Nancy. “False Bilingualism.” in Losing North: Musings on Land Tongue and Self. Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2002. Her translation of Nord Perdu.
Jones, D.G. “Grounds for Translation,” Ellipse 21 (1977).
____. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970.
Kippur, Sara. Writing it Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015.
Mezei, Kathy, Sherry Simon and Luise Von Flotow, eds. Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U.P., 2014.
Pivato, Joseph. ed. Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian-Canadian Writing. Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1985.
____. Echo: Essays on Other Literatures. Toronto: Guernica, 1994.
Sutherland, Ronald. Second Image: Comparative Studies in Québec/Canadian Literature. Toronto: New Press, 1971.
____. The New Hero: Essays in Comparative Quebec/Canadian Literature. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977.
Verdicchio, Pasquale, & Antonio D’Alfonso. Duologue: On Culture and Identity. Toronto: Guernica, 1998.