By Klara du Plessis

Failure is a hot topic. Montreal’s Phi Foundation recently put out a call for lectures on unsuccessful art projects under the heading “Fail / Pass.” Eavesdropping London, a UK-based experimental music festival, is inviting contributions on “Experiments in Failure,” while artists, broadly defined, are everywhere discussing the lack of return on grants, residencies, and other public-facing opportunities. Art and ideas for art are failing, and even that failure is now harnessed for productivity models. Rejected art is evaluated for inclusion or dismissal, to pass or fail, at prestigious institutions, but this time the criteria for success is how badly the work has bombed.

In Fall 2023, the director of the Association of English-Language Publishers of Quebec (AELAQ), Rebecca West, and editor and coordinator of events for AELAQ and the Quebec Writers’ Federation, Maria Schamis Turner, invited me to curate an experimental, bilingual literary performance at the annual Salon du Livre de Montréal book fair. Poets Kaie Kellough and Chantal Neveu enthusiastically agreed to collaborate on an event titled “Writing the Environment / Écrire l’Environnement,” slated for noon on November 24, 2023. The event would feature work from their books Magnetic Equator (2019) and La Vie Radieuse (2016), as well as their respective translations Équateur Magnétique (2023, trans. Stéphane Martelly) and This Radiant Life (2020, trans. Erín Moure). I adopted the role of curator, functioning as a liaison between poets and host institutions, organizing brainstorming and work sessions, and facilitating discussion that would lead towards a rough script, intertwining Kellough and Neveu’s poetries in both languages into a vibrant and discursive performance.

The process of working with Kellough and Neveu was extremely generative and inspiring. We met over two weekends to isolate broad themes in the chosen books, their touchpoints and tensions. For example, Kellough’s writing populates the page in a much denser way than Neveu’s. Her words run like a delicate spine down an expanse of white. Productively combining these compositional divergences was an opportunity we needed to recognize and resolve in poetic dialogue. We also had to agree on performative approaches to sounding poetry collaboratively before an audience. Early on, we decided that we would restrict the performance to only a few excerpts from each text. Rather than share a progression of constantly changing poetry for forty-five minutes, we would select less text, but prioritize repetition. The poets would return to the same texts, initiating a different mode of audience attention, one which supported familiarity, closer and deeper listening. 

We further determined to isolate a series of cues that would be applied live in an improvisational mode. These included an opening period of calling out single keywords from across the two poetry collections and their translations. These keywords would bounce off of and expand upon each other’s word selections in the moment. These cues also included a consideration for when poets needed silence to read certain sections alone; at other more dramatic junctures, the poets would read over one another, either as a soundscape of support and contrast, or as deliberate cacophony and noise. It became clear that Kellough and Neveu were not only engaging thematically with climate crisis and ecology, but that the dual method of simultaneous preselection and improvisation would also allow them to actively write their own embodied environment in performance. The intended performance felt dynamic and full of potential. It would offer a range of sonic sensation, an equal dose of elegance and wily fervour in verse. In two voices.

In the week leading up to the Salon du Livre, however, Kellough started feeling unwell and by the day before, he was testing positive for COVID-19. There was no way that the performance could go ahead as planned. I could never replace the virtuosity of Kellough’s live presence myself or find another poet at such short notice. Neveu and I didn’t have enough time to redirect our performance method to reimagine the event with my poetry. As last minute as the hour before our scheduled event, Neveu and I pivoted a replacement performance by bringing excerpts from my collections Ekke (2018), Hell Light Flesh (2020), and Skin & Meat Sky (2022) into less interactive but still gentle dialogue with her writing. It worked and we received very favourable feedback from the audience, but the immersive quality of the planned event was missing. It didn’t carry forward the drive of weeks of creative dialogue, intention, and collaboration. One could say that the event was a failure. 

Klara du Plessis and Chantal Neveau performing at Salon du Livre 2023

And yet, I’m left uncomfortable with my own dismissal of the event. Intuitively I know that the success of a project is not dependent on its product. “Success” should always be qualified with scare quotes, defined as inward-facing and private, processual and ephemeral. The work that Kellough, Neveu, and myself achieved together, alone among ourselves, was exhilarating and resonant. It was work that will carry forward in my own thinking around literary curation and performance, as I’m sure it will also manifest in small, unexpected ways in their ongoing practices over time. Without an audience, this work doesn’t culminate in the completion of attention, witness, and response. It doesn’t solidify into the longevity of documentation and archive. Incomplete, the idea of this event might one day be picked up, transformed, and performed as a different version of itself. It might echo as an inconclusive process, as endlessly deferred and emergent potential.

Klara du Plessis is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, literary curator, and poet. Her most recent publications include G, translingual poetry composed in collaboration with Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, and I’mpossible collab, a collection of literary essays. Post-mortem of the event is forthcoming fall 2024 from Palimpsest Press.

Illustration by Nora Kelly.

The post Productive Failure and the Process of Not Performing appeared first on Read Quebec.

Visit the official Salon du Livre de Montreal website for more information and the link to purchase tickets.

The post Écrire l’environnement / Writing the Environment appeared first on Read Quebec.

by Léa Murat-Ingles

Translation in Quebec is heading for quite the resurgence lately, with works such as Perdre la tête, a new translation of Heather O’Neill’s When We Lost Our Heads, nominated for the prestigious Prix des Libraires du Québec. Black literature is also benefiting from this: meaningful books like No Crystal Stair, one of Afro-Quebec’s most notable historical novels by Montreal author Mairuth Sarsfield, originally published in Ontario in 1993, was reissued by Linda Leith Publishing in 2021 in both English and French. And with countless translations being put out by big French-language editor Mémoire d’encrier every year, translation in Quebec won’t be slowing down anytime soon (unless recession hits us really really badly, and let’s hope not). Something, however, is quite new in this revival : the way Black and queer translators are actively using translation as a form of transgression.

As we know, African and Caribbean diasporas have been present in the province of Quebec even before it was so called. These multilingual communities have since created a space somewhere in the binary dynamic of our province by shattering a staggering amount of language barriers. Thankfully, it now seems to be happening in literature too, with new publications that entirely rethink the translation process, and what it means to be a translator in Quebec. Two upcoming releases are noteworthy in that sense: The Rage Letters, translated by Kama La Mackerel for Metonymy Press from its original French version Les enragé.e.s by Valérie Bah (published in the book series Les Martiales at Les éditions du remue-ménage in 2021), and the French translation, by Stéphane Martelly, of Magnetic Equator by Kaie Kellough. As fate sometimes has it, these three interdisciplinary artists had been working as a community way before these publications were even planned.

In 2018, poet, painter, and teacher Martelly (Inventaires, Tryptique, 2016) created Les Martiales, a new groundbreaking book series of fiction and non-fiction dedicated to publishing Afrodescendant women and non-binary individuals at Les éditions du remue-ménage. Filmmaker and photographer Bah was the second voice to emerge from this endeavour with Les enragé.e.s, a collection of intertwined short stories about a group of Afroqueer young adults in Montreal.

Kama La Mackerel (Zom Fam, Metonymy Press, 2020) got their hands on an early manuscript of Les enragé.e.s and fell in love “not even halfway through” reading, delighted to discover that their friend had such a beautiful writing practice beyond their unique talents as a visual artist. Bah had been capturing and recording most of La Mackerel’s brimming artistic practice – exhibits, performances, spoken poetry, and so much more. For La Mackerel, feeling like Bah played such a huge part in their grassroots projects and their development as an artist left them wanting to do something in return.

So when Metonomy Press approached La Mackerel to get suggestions for their very first French-to-English translation, they immediately thought of Les enragé.e.s, their new favourite book. “The way that it talks about race and queerness unapologetically, the way she is writing about blackness, the way she felt it, in the intersection with queerness… it made me feel seen,” they recall. Taking on translating such a book is no easy task – a whole year of work – but, thankfully, they had access to the best collaborator: their friend, the author of the original book, no less. This enjoyable collaboration came with greater challenges. “For me, translation is intimidating,” La Mackerel admits. “I feel like it should come from humility and from having reverence to the work, the artistic process, and the book. There is so much that Valérie is doing to the French language in this book. I hope I can render this in [my] translation.”

The Rage Letters, a powerful title full of mutual appreciation and respect, has been given to the book, coming out this spring. “Translating is a way of giving back and to hold Val’s words as much as she held my practice,” says La Mackerel. Bah, on the other hand, thinks La Mackerel has made the book better with this translation process. “They are bringing a new meaning to it,” she says. “In terms of language, their precision and insightful look are amplifying the social themes of the book. I feel like our interaction is improving my work.” Her involvement in La Mackerel’s work sparked a newfound curiosity for translation, but also for her own book. “The work of translation feels like a creative risk… Being Haitian in so-called Montreal really means something; the diasporas are showing it with how they shape culture and language. How do you transpose that into the English language? How do you make them coherent?”

This translation means a great deal to Martelly, who edited Les enragé.e.s. “Quebec projects itself in the rest of Canada as a homogeneous place, which is false,” Martelly notes. “Valérie’s book will allow people to see other realities of black existence in Quebec, from the point of view of second-generation black queer youth.” She hopes other unique translations like these will seep through the tight sealing between French and English literatures in Quebec. Her next publication is also a translation, Équateur Magnétique, from Kaie Kellough’s prized collection of poems, Magnetic Equator. Like Bah and La Mackerel, Martelly has known Kellough for quite some time, from collaborations such as the Protests & Pedagogy project at Concordia University. 

For Martelly, Kellough’s work has a uniqueness – one she intimately understands. Both she and her colleague are established poets, and of Caribbean origin: “The particularity of Caribbean texts is the difficulty of their translation. There are always at least two languages ​​in action [Western and Caribbean languages], sometimes more in contamination. It requires a lot of knowledge to understand the particular cultural context of Caribbean writing, of the sacred languages being used, of the multiple Caribbean artists being quoted.” Unlike La Mackerel with Bah, Martelly wanted to have a first go at the translation process without Kellough’s input. Doing so helped her gain a creative freedom that gave her the tools to translate such a colossal work, which was nominated for multiple awards, and won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2020.

To translate untranslatable words and to find ways to restitute Kellough’s incredible rhythm and images, Martelly had to break open the core of language and use etymology to invent new words and cheat the oh-so-rigid French syntax. This wasn’t a new process for her, because she had been playing with language, both in Creole and French, in her own poetry: “I have always been very sensitive to language, especially through poetry. There, language can be worked and transformed.”

This kind of transgression is what links Stéphane Martelly to Kama La Mackerel in their work as multilingual translators. Since they were both given unconditional trust by the original authors, both artists were comfortably able to break the rules of hegemonic translation. Martelly, for example, got to slip in some Haitian cultural references that weren’t originally in the book – with Kellough’s approval, of course. For La Mackerel too, translation is an intrinsically transgressive form of art that allows them to recreate a work chosen politically, to “get immersed in a subjectivity and a universe that is deeply transgressive, a multiplicity that is political.” Valérie Bah shares her friend and colleague’s philosophy: “Our queer creative structures and ways of being bring language beyond the binary and dominance to renegotiate language.”

Léa Murat-Ingles (she/they) is a bookseller, research assistant and French literature master’s student of Haitian descent. As part of her studies, she is particularly interested in Haitian literature from Quebec, Afrofuturism, and the role of archives in research creation. She was born and raised in Montreal, where she still resides.

Illustration by Rakim Jah

Stéphane Martelly on Instagram

Valérie Bah official site, Instagram

Kama La Mackerel official site, Instagram

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