Translation and Spinach Bagels

The first full day at the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference was long, tiring, and often exhilarating. I was on a panel on creative writing across cultures, along with Ray Hsu and ghazal poet Sheniz Janmohamed, and—as ever—it felt as if the interesting discussions were just getting going as we had to call time on things. The cross-cultural (and cross-linguistic) theme was picked up later when the wonderful Nicole Brossard and Erin Mouré did the plenary session—in French and English, mainly, with smatterings of Spanish and Gallician—on questions of translation. Nicole and Erin’s session was yesterday’s absolute highlight: translation as more than mechanics, a matter of allowing language to seep into the body, a matter of multiple cross-currents, a matter of—as a flesh and blood human being—allowing oneself to be affected corporeally, a matter of translating not just the text, but the pleasure of the text. My favourite quote of the day was from Erin’s talk: “Books are emigrants, they belong in the places where they arrive.”

Will Ferguson in the evening, talking about writing and humour, was also superbly entertaining: genial, funny and insightful; but I confess that I was on the lightweights bus back to the residency, rather than included amongst the rather smaller cohort who went on to party hard at the Spoke Club until the early hours. Today is another full day of talks (and, inevitably, large buckets of coffee); and tomorrow there’s the Toronto Book Fair and Paper Show (a paper show! — this is bibliogeek heaven) at St. Lawrence Market, so we’ll be heading down there before catching the flight home.

But now it’s time for breakfast: I’m off to Tatsu’s bakery for one of their heavenly spinach bagels…