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Although Canadian literature was virtually unknown in the USSR during the Cold War era (1945-1991), although few works by Canadian authors were published in Russian translation in the Soviet Union, and there were no critical reviews of these books before the Perestroika period of the 1980s, the Soviet press at times referred to Canadian authors in order to serve its own objectives or rather the objectives of the ruling Communist Party. This article explores how Canadian literature was received in the USSR during the Cold War, what purposes this reception served, and which projected images of Canada can be found in the reviews of Canadian books and articles on Canadian literature published in the Russian language in magazines and newspapers of the time. The monographs on Canadian literature published in the USSR in Russian are also discussed here, to see, among other reasons, if Soviet critics made a distinction between English-Canadian literature and French-Canadian (or Québécois) literature. Finally, this article sets out to examine not only the representations of Canadian literature and Canadian society as conveyed by the Soviet press but also those put forward by Russian researchers of the period in their scholarly monographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, an anthology of Quebec poetry titled 15 Poetas de Quebec came out in Mexico, coedited by Écrits des Forges and Mantis Editores. Two years later, the same anthology was retranslated in Argentina, this time coedited by Leviatân. Of course, the fact that Écrits des Forges circulates the same selection twice in Spanish within such a short time span contributes to establishing a certain canon of Quebec poetry. It remains to be seen however, whether the two Spanish versions present this canon in a similar light or project two different images of it. On the one hand, this essay attempts to identify the characteristic features of Quebec identity as it is portrayed by the poems selected by Écrits des Forges; on the other hand, by analyzing the translation of distinct markers of Quebec French within the selection, the essay explores how the two Spanish versions rendered this image in the target language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Louis Riel has received much study as a man of politics but little to date as a man of letters. Indeed, only since the publication in 1985 of volume 4 of "The Collected Writings of Louis Riel," under the direction of Glen Campbell, have researchers had access to the founder of Manitoba's entire body of poetic work. The interest in studying the poetic writings of Riel resides primarily in the unique character of a poetic universe in which a temporal world and a spiritual world both coexist and collide. The temporal world was inspired by the difficult circumstances of the Métis people and the personal problems of Louis Riel, while the spiritual one had its roots in Catholic traditions. The poet worked to legitimize his vocation as a prophet by appropriating certain characteristics of the priesthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent inclusion of English-language texts in Quebec literature owes much to the work of Gail Scott and its resonance with the French-language corpus. To date, three of Scott's novels have been published in French translation, which has facilitated their inclusion. Published at approximately 10-year intervals, by a different translator and publisher each time, these translations have employed opposing strategies. Their treatment of multilingualism, Quebec French, and stylistic experimentation has assumed changing forms. Above and beyond the translators' subjectivity, these differences take on greater clarity when related to some trends (and conceptions of translation) specific to Franco-Québécois literature at the time each translation was published. Although these translations do in part reflect the evolution of Scott's work, they shed greater light on the evolution of Franco-Québécois literature. They also show the complementary—and insufficient—role that each existing translation has played in Quebec readers' perceptions of Scott's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There exists a preconceived notion that the works of Mordecai Richler have, in francophone Quebec, been tainted by his various essays and articles on linguistic issues and nationalism; however, a review of the history of Richlerian criticism in Quebec yields a better understanding of how existing argumentative mechanisms, articulating the relationships between "us" and the nation, were only strengthened by such polemics. The runaway criticism of the 1980s and 1990s had the paradoxical effect of projecting Richler to the forefront of debates as an antagonistic figure, a role that his defenders subsequently used to attack a restrictive vision of national membership. Rather than resulting from a hybridization or meeting of cultures, the reappropriation of Richler's work by a portion of Quebec critics serves to frame a new conception of what it means to be Québécois. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a reflection on the essays, articles, prefaces, and interviews of three contemporary anglophone writer-translators from Quebec: Philip Stratford, David Homel, and Gail Scott. Based on the premise that writer-translators maintain a privileged relationship with the space between languages and cultures, which they are bound to explore through translation and writing, the question is to determine the extent to which Stratford, Homel, and Scott have contributed to building an Anglo-Québécois identity and literature since the early 1980s. Their respective discourses on literature and translation, being symptomatic of three different intellectual approaches, reveal, on the one hand, the unstable, plurivocal, and evolving nature of this identity and literature and, on the other, a striking homology between these objects and the translation processes. It is this homology that the essay strives to emphasize. The accent is on the images of multiculturalism and forms of creativity that flow from writer-translators' knowledge of the languages-cultures with/between which they work and the modalities according to which they negotiate the difficult passage separating these two entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]