Hybridising English, hybridising French: Robert Dickson’s translation of Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen
Résumé
Kiss of the Fur Queen was first published by Doubleday in 1998. In what remains Tomson Highway’s only novel to this day, the Cree Canadian writer gives a partly autobiographical, partly fictitious account of the early life of his brother, René and himself through the story of their fictional counterparts—Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis.
Like Tomson and René, the two fictional brothers were born in the early 1950s in a family of nomadic caribou hunters in Northern Manitoba. At the age of five, they were removed from their family and sent to a Catholic residential school hundreds of miles away from their native community. There, their names were changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel. They were forced to learn English and forbidden to speak Cree. They were also repeatedly raped by the school’s headmaster, Father Roland Lafleur.
The years spent at Birch Lake residential school, however, also prove beneficial to the two boys. Champion eventually becomes a concert pianist and a playwright, as Tomson Highway did in real life, while Ooneemeetoo pursues a career in ballet dancing, as did René. Nevertheless, the scars left by the many abuses suffered at the hands of the oblate Fathers remain, and Ooneemeeto and René share the same tragic fate, slipping into male prostitution first, and dying prematurely of AIDS in the early 1990s.
The only attempt at translating Kiss of the Fur Queen dates back to 2004, when the famous Franco-Ontarian poet Robert Dickson published a version in French entitled Champion et Ooneemeetoo at Prise de parole, an Ontarian publishing house.
The aim of this chapter is to explore the problems raised by the translation of a text which offers various layers of cultural encryption. To begin with, I shall focus on the difficulty of reading, interpreting and translating a linguistically hybrid and composite text by an author who is plurilingual, but whose mother tongue is not English. Then, I will address issues inherent in the translation of a text whose main concern is to reconcile the dominant and the indigenous cultures, a salient feature of Highway’s novel which makes it even harder to transpose. To finish with, I will contend that Dickson’s translation is an act of reconciliation and creation in itself inasmuch as it is a version of Highway’s novel delivered by a translator who is a poet himself, and who is not a native speaker of the target language of his translation.