Translation and the Global City

Bridges and Gateways

Judith Weisz Woodsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367555689
• eBook ISBN: 9781000449426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation and the Global City showcases fresh perspectives on translation in a global context, drawing on case studies from Montreal and other multilingual cosmopolitan cities to examine the historical, sociological and cultural factors underpinning the travel of languages, ideas and cultures across borders.

Building on the "spatial turn" in translation studies, the book adopts a bridge metaphor to explore the complexities of translational spaces and the ways in which translation acts can both unite and divide in the global city. The collection initiates the discussion with a focus on the Canadian context and specifically the city of Montreal, where historical circumstances, public policy and shifting language politics have led to a burgeoning translation industry. It goes on to address issues of translation in other regions and cities of the world, generating new insights and opening avenues for further research into the relations between languages and cultures.

This volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, especially those with an interest in translation theory and the sociology of translation.

1 The Jews of Montreal

At the Crossroads of Languages and Translation

Pierre Anctil

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094074-3

Introduction

Montreal—both the island city and the surrounding area—has spawned a complex interplay of cultures. The multiple accounts of the cultural history of Montreal are replete with tales of competition and conflict, as well as more peaceful exchanges and compromise. This chapter proposes an overview of the historical and political circumstances that led to an essentially bilingual city. At an important point in time, the city attracted a substantial group of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, who created a distinct space for themselves with a high degree of cultural, literary and artistic sophistication. The following pages trace the evolution of this third culture and the interactions with English-speaking and later French-speaking institutional and creative milieus. Some leading figures, acclaimed for both writing and translating, are introduced, and the positive impact of what can be dubbed an ever-evolving translation “movement” is underscored.

Montreal: A Cultural and Linguistic Crossroads

Strategically located at the confluence of three rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa and the Richelieu, Montreal has long been regarded as a key meeting place, first by the Indigenous Peoples who inhabited the lands now called Canada and then by successive waves of colonizers, settlers and immigrants.

For centuries before Jacques Cartier climbed atop Mount Royal in 1535 to observe the surrounding country, and even before the King of France claimed the territory as his own, Montreal was a passageway used by many different Indigenous communities in their quest for rare goods, hunting grounds and secure habitats. The colonists, too, regarded Montreal as a major gateway to the interior of the continent, which held the lure of multiple natural resources and mineral riches. Gatherings were necessarily pluricultural and multilingual, hence involving some degree of interlinguistic exchange in both precolonial times and the post-settler period (Delâge 1991; Warren and Delâge 2017). The many cultural and economic forces at play within the broader region of Montreal culminated in August 1701 with the signing of the Great Peace of Montreal, an event with enduring consequences (Beaulieu, Viau and Back 2001). Representatives from thirty-nine Indigenous Nations gathered to sign a treaty of mutual recognition and open trade under the nominal authority of the governor of New France, Louis-Hector de Callière.

Mechanisms such as this, time-tested models of exchange and appropriation, form the basis for our discussion of cultural developments in twentieth-century Montreal, following periods of mass migration from Europe and elsewhere in the world. The city had always witnessed the displacement and movement of communities from far-ranging geographical origins, seeking a secure place in which to settle. The dawn of the twentieth century was no exception, with its intense influx of people from various backgrounds, who brought with them an extraordinary diversity of language, culture and religious beliefs. Some came from urban settings and engaged in commerce, while others hailed from the rural communities of distant hinterlands. A cacophony of voices soon flowed from the port area into the heart of the city, following well-worn patterns of migration.

The central entranceway to New France and later British North America, the Island of Montreal diverged in at least one respect from similar places in the Americas, such as Boston, New York, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. A fluvial city at some distance from the sea, Montreal possessed the unique feature of having been the decisive pivot point of two competing colonial empires, the French and the British, which successively controlled access to the interior of the continent. The region had been populated by settlers, first originating from France and then from the British Isles, who ended up living side by side, each in their respective political enclave and institutional network. In the late nineteenth century, the two national communities lived in relative harmony, essentially indifferent to each other. By tacit agreement, neither community interfered with the internal governance of its counterpart. Historians would later describe this phenomenon as a form of deeply entrenched ethnic compartmentalization, truly characteristic of what both Francophones and Anglophones felt should be the social norm in a city belonging to the British Empire (Germain and Rose 2000; Linteau 2013).

For reasons reflected in the British North America Act, ¹ this meant, in concrete terms, that neither political nor demographic group in Montreal was willing to come to terms with the massive flow of immigrants to the city in the early twentieth century. This was unlike most other places in North America. Protestant Anglophones, who generally had no intention of welcoming French-speaking Catholics into their sphere of political and economic influence, and no definite plans to assimilate them linguistically or culturally—contrary to what is generally believed—also looked down upon new immigrants with disdain and suspicion. While the Anglo-British elites of the city kept to themselves, French Canadians living in Montreal, who were actually dominant numerically, developed a siege mentality without any pretentions of becoming the leading and all-powerful group in Montreal. If allophone² newcomers from distant Europe reached the city, Francophones believed, it was of no concern to French Canada, unless there were Catholics among the immigrant masses who were in need of direct assistance. French Canada, many nationalists felt, did not have the political means at its disposal to integrate foreigners, nor were there any valid reasons why such a demographic flow from abroad should penetrate its recognized institutional boundaries. This remained true until the 1960s, when the Quiet Revolution brought about a profound change in mentality.³ Migrants who arrived in considerable numbers in the early twentieth century were thus not immediately integrated into either the French or the English populations. Rather, they lived among themselves in specific Montreal neighbourhoods, rarely entering into direct or sustained contact with the two explicitly dominant groups.

This unique feature of Montreal was nowhere more visible than in the continued existence of two separate school systems, each derived from the vastly different religious and cultural traditions of Francophone Catholics and Anglophone Protestants. When public schools began to emerge elsewhere in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, there was not the political will to institute a single educational system for the city of Montreal. The first public schools in the city were founded and financed by church authorities, each denomination taking an interest in the well-being of its own people.

Although there were numerous immigrants from the British Isles to Canada between 1900 and 1914, newcomers came mainly from regions of Europe that had little or no connection to the existing populations of Montreal hailing from Ancien Régime France or Georgian and Victorian Great Britain. Many were not even remotely associated with Roman Catholicism or Anglican Protestantism, which shared control over the rigidly bi-denominational institutional structure of Montreal. The immigrants who landed at Canadian ports began to spread out over a vast territory, many having as a final destination the still undefined rural regions in the west, where very difficult living conditions awaited them. Others, having had some experience of urban life or having received a formal education, sought instead to settle in Canada’s major cities, where there was a pressing demand for workers. In the late nineteenth century, Montreal’s rapidly emerging manufacturing sector—which produced mainly clothing, tobacco and alcoholic beverages—was a magnet for migrants with an urban profile and skills that could be adapted to the local economy.

The Great Migration

The Jews who hailed from Eastern Europe were in this latter category. As they set foot on the continent for the first time, they were drawn to an age-old pathway: boulevard Saint-Laurent, known to English speakers as St. Lawrence Boulevard or the “Main.” Starting in the early 1900s, a dense network of immigrant institutions, commercial venues and places of worship emerged on the Main, at the heart of a narrow corridor between the privileged Golden Square Mile to the west and vast working-class French Canadian neighbourhoods to the east.

For many decades, Jewish immigrants, in particular, populated the neighbourhoods surrounding St. Lawrence Boulevard, where they lived cheek by jowl, beginning a long process of socioeconomic integration. For the most part, they found employment in consumer goods industries that were dependent on an ever-expanding pool of cheap labour (Gubbay 1989; Anctil 2002).

In the polyphonic Montreal environment of the turn of the century, where ingrained attitudes of minorization and deep suspicion of the Other were the rule among the more established populations, the massive influx of newcomers led to an entirely new cultural context in the city. Once split between two so-called founding communities, which were grounded in a Western and Christian ethos, the city abruptly entered a new period after the First World War. In Montreal, a multiplicity of new identities emerged as immigrants from almost all European destinations found their way to the country for the first time and as an economic boom propelled the national edifice forward. Once again, Montreal was seen as the gateway to a vast territory now being transferred from the British Crown to a sovereign country called the Dominion of Canada.

The ebullient climate of the 1900s held the promise of a bright future and limitless economic expansion. At the same time, different forces at play in the Tsarist Empire—sustained state-sanctioned persecution, dire economic prospects in the Pale of Settlement⁴ and general political upheaval—triggered the exodus of a significant cohort of Jews. Attracted for the most part by the neighbouring American Republic, many Jewish migrants landed in Canada, where they formed significant Jewish enclaves in Montreal and other Canadian cities such as Toronto and Winnipeg.

Unbeknownst to these migrants as they disembarked from ships and trains, the city had previously welcomed a small contingent of British Jews. Numbering only a few hundred, mainly engaged in commerce and discreet about their Jewish origins, they had gradually become relatively well integrated into English Protestant circles. By 1911, these more established Jews found themselves facing an influx of nearly 30,000 of their coreligionists, imbued with a revolutionary fervour held over from life in Russia. Class distinctions and ideological confrontations were thus commonplace among Montreal Jews of the early twentieth century. But the shock was felt even more within the host society, composed of two populations that each perceived itself as vulnerable to external threats, never having encountered a demographically significant group of non-Christian immigrants bent on becoming integrated into the urban fabric of Montreal. Soon after their arrival, the highly visible Russian Jewish contingent had to come to terms with the fact that they were entering a society in which only two religions were officially recognized, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Within the Quebec public education system, there was no legal room for members of other faiths.⁵ This was further complicated by the existence of long-standing anti-Semitism, in various guises, on both sides of the linguistic divide in Montreal (Tulchinsky 2007; Anctil 2017a).

Because of their position in relation to the rigid Christian denominational system in place in Quebec society—essentially their exclusion from it—the newly arrived Jews soon gained a certain level of political visibility. Within a few years, they also began to dominate the emerging immigrant neighbourhoods in the central part of Montreal. With strength in numbers, the Russian Jews came to occupy a central position in debates surrounding cultural and religious diversity in the city, a subject that both dominant groups approached with great trepidation and perhaps irrational fears of becoming marginalized politically. As the Jewish minority increasingly acquired importance, entirely new cultural and linguistic phenomena took shape in Montreal.

It was not long before Jews made up Montreal’s largest immigrant community. By 1910, the Yiddish language was the most widespread immigrant tongue in use in Montreal; it would remain the third most spoken language in the city for close to half a century.⁶ This paved the way for an unparalleled level of literary and artistic production, the most original to manifest itself among all nonofficial language migrant groups present in Canada (Fuks [1980] 2005; Anctil 2017b). The concentration of Russian Jews in Montreal resulted in a flowering of creative energy in Yiddish, most notably in the fields of theatre and journalism. This was a group that also valued political involvement, as union activists, for example. By the 1910s, the city had a daily Yiddish newspaper, followed by part-time schools for children of immigrants, a public lending library, intellectual circles of all kinds, a theatre troupe and a nascent literary movement, all of which functioned in Yiddish.

Jews had several distinct advantages over migrants of other origins, which gave them social mobility that was unprecedented for a recently arrived population. First, Jews from the Pale of Settlement had become urbanized to a large degree and had served as small-scale economic brokers within the Russian Empire. Consequently, their transition from the small-scale Russian town, or shtetl, to large industrial cities in North America was neither insurmountable nor particularly traumatic. We know from the written testimonials left by Montreal Jewish immigrants (for example, Medres 1947 [2000]; Novak 1957 [2009]; Shtern 1982 [2006]) that many of those who arrived in Canada in those days had already gained relevant experience. They had travelled to relatively large Russian towns and saw themselves as well adapted to an urban existence. Most importantly, they had also attained a level of literacy that far surpassed that of non-Jewish immigrants from similar regions of the world. Because of their precarious minority status in the Tsarist Empire, moreover, Eastern European Jews were polyglots—engaged in “translation” in the broadest sense of the term and practising what we would describe today as intercultural communication. A vast majority of Russian Jews could read a newspaper published in their hometown or in a larger city nearby. They had daily encounters with their non-Jewish neighbours and had the ability to correspond with members of their extended families who were frequently spread out over vast distances. They not only conversed among ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Jews of Montreal
• 2 Translating the American Counterculture in/for Quebec1
• 3 An Ultraminor Literature
• 4 Indigenous Peoples-Settler Relations and Language Politics in Twenty-First-Century Canada
• 5 Literary Translation in Southern Brazil
• 6 In the Shadow of the Cathedral
• 7 Activist Translation in the World of Food
• 8 Bridging Difference
• 9 Going Global
• 10 Your Language Escapes Me!
• Epilogue
• Index