It’s about the fractured French in “Trouvé Mort,” the poem by Catherine Owen reprinted in the Findings section of No. 64. While aware that Geist and its staff are not responsible for the poem’s content, I’ve been teasing apart the levels of irony and offence in your choosing it for this issue. The French narrative reads like a tale told by an illiterate. Assuming that’s deliberate, a possible interpretation of its intent is mockery. But who or what is being mocked—our national policy of bilingualism, the reader, or the venerable Journal de Montréal? It’s possible that the author is mocking herself. She and her publisher have brangled French grammar, orthography and typography beyond Leon Rooke’s wildest dreams. So pity the challenged anglos who can’t tell passive from reflexive or where to put the accents when you have only the acute to work with. If that’s the case, it’s clever of you to include the poem in an issue featuring pieces on the Nootka, how to alienate sushi-making lovers and the decline of multiculturalism. But there’s still a problem. The author lightly attributes the French portion to Le Journal de Montréal, a real-world Canadian daily that, by the way, has sponsored some very generous literary awards for Québec writers. I’d as soon see that publication quoting Geist as follows: “Captain James Cook and his crews discover themselves the rythmic and musicalness of an hip-hop people of a parallel universe at the limits to the west of the Empire Britannic on it’s pacific shore.” That’s just about how bad it is.
—S.E. Stewart, Saskatoon
Geist inadvertently introduced a scanning error into the text of the piece—cadaure for cadavre—and we shortened the title from “Un Patient est Trouvé Mort: Haikus from the French” to “Trouvé Mort.” We regret these errors and we apologize to the author and to Anvil Press. —Ed. [Corrections made to online publication.]
Catherine Owen responds: The French quotes you dub “brangled” are, in fact, culled verbatim from an article in your supposedly venerable Journal de Montréal. The errors in tense and accents are not mine, but theirs. I did not “lightly attribute” these phrasings to them, unfortunately. My own English haikus are, however, free renderings, not exact translations as would have been made evident by the missing portion of the title: “Haikus from the French.” Save your ire for the crass journalists who were too busy capitalizing on a man’s suicide to spell-check!
