The Task of Attention

In your book Translating Montreal, you describe it as a "divided city," and you propose reading it via turn-ofthe-century Trieste or Prague, colonial Calcutta, or even contemporary Mostar, evidently challenging the comfortable image of the Canadian mosaic. The historical English-language community is dwindling, but English continues to be an important player-as an international language rather than as the historic colonial enemy. Montreal will, however, remain a French-language city and it is important to defend the language laws that allow French to be protected in the public realm. Historically, the ties to the language and culture have been very strong, also as far as supporting the idea of sovereignty-one thinks, for instance, of Charles de Gaulle shouting "Vive ¡e Québec ¡ibre!" from the balcony of Montreal City Hall in 1967. Among the many encounters between the various cultures of Montreal described in your book there are, of course, instances of translation in the strict sense. [...]he finally made an allowance for two translations into languages themselves considered impure and déclassé, i.e., Glaswegian Scots (Bill Findlay's and Martin Bowman's 1989 translation as The Guid Sisters) and Yiddish (Goldie Morgentaler's 1992 translation as Di Shvegerins). In 2015, he was awarded residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre with a project on post-millennial Canadian prose for the journal Literatura na Swiecie. krzymajer@gmail.com 1 Kanade, di goldene medine?