Malcolm Reid et la traversée de la ville

According to the author, Malcolm Reid’s The Shouting Signpainters: A Literary and Political Account of Quebec Revolutionary Nationalism (1972) is a cult classic recounting an initiatic journey (by a west-end Anglophone) across Montreal into the heart of the left-wing, Québécois-nationalist political and cultural periodical Parti pris territory. The periodical was published between 1963 and 1968. She claims that the ethnographic voyage is also a work of translation and at the heart of The Shouting Signpainters is the question of equivalence. In linguistic terms, she argues, this is the question of how to render the specificity of Parti pris language in another tongue. The author asks: If this language is so specific to the circumstances of its emergence, how can it be carried over into another context? Is the only solution a kind of bilingual commentary, a process of paraphrase that admits to the irreducible semantic charge of the original? Is the attraction of difference to be found precisely in its local and non-transferable nature?

Anthropologie et Sociétés

Vol. 28

no. 3

91-103

2004

fr