François Turcot

In preparation for this week’s commentary, I was flipping through TCR’s recent special issue on multilingualism, and I came across a very interesting essay on translation by Erín Moure. The essay is structured as a kind of journal or daybook recording the process of translating Québecois poet François Turcot’s Mon dinosaure into English. Mouré describes translation not as “bearing across” (get it?!), but as “a poiesis,a making. Each small piece of the Turcot poem, in English, takes hours of building, forming syllables, seeing how they interact.”