Norman Cheadle and Lucien Pelletier, eds. Canadian Cultural Exchange: Translation and Transculturation/Échanges culturels au Canada : Traduction et transculturation. Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007, 432 p.

This book cannot be made to fit into a given mould any more than the characters, real or fictional, that inhabit its pages. The bold orange and blue cover, based on the painting ¡Bailamos! by Michel Galipeau, entices us into a patchwork of articles by specialists from various academic areas who analyze the past and present cultural exchanges that make up the fabric of Canada. The cross-cultural elements in question are almost exclusively linked to authors and literary texts, and the seventeen contributions (plus the appendix) revolve around the key notions of “transculturation” (a term coined by Fernando Ortiz and discussed in several articles) and of “translation” at the social, textual and personal levels. The cases examined in the book’s chapters range from cultural appropriation to translational appropriation to reappropriation and highlight very positive aspects of the often maligned concept of “appropriation.” The seventeen contributions are organized according to five themes, roughly speaking: Canada’s past, cultural appropriation (good or bad?), transculturation embodied in Canada, two solitudes plus, and Canada’s future. In addition, there are several other themes that cut across these divisions. The Spanish title of the cover illustration anticipates what proves to be one of the most prevalent cultural presences in the book: Latin America. At the social level, Victor Armony examines “La ‘latinité’ des Québécois à l’épreuve” in an attempt to define the characteristics that make up a “Latin” culture and to determine if Quebec shares these characteristics to a significant extent with Latin America. At the textual level, in “I Write My Self: The Female Body as a Site of Transculturation in the Short Stories of Carmen Rodríguez,” Carol Stos compares Carmen Rodríguez’s “transcreated” Spanish and English versions of essentially the same collection of short stories (De Cuerpo Entero and and a body to remember with) and the reasoning behind her cultural adjustments. And at the personal level, Neil Besner’s essay, “Translating North and South: Elizabeth Bishop, Biography and Brazil,” looks at the figure of American poet Elizabeth Bishop, the difficulties of her “personal translation” into a Brazilian context, and the translation of her biography back into English. The Indigenous and Métis presence in Canada marks another major cultural identity examined in the collection from both a historical and contemporary point of view. In an historical vein, Alexandra Klinge and Alan MacDonell’s article, “La voix de l’Autre dans certains récits de voyages de l’Ouest canadien au temps de la Nouvelle-France,” tells us about the indigenous voice in explorer La Vérandrye’s journals and its role in the justification of the colonial agenda. Albert Braz’s article “The Creative Translator: Textual Additions and Deletions in A Martyr’s Folly” compares the strategic and possibly politically-motivated differences between two anonymous translations of a novel based on the life of Louis Riel. A study of a more contemporary event, Beverley Curran’s “Dry Lips Moves to Tokyo: Does Indigenous Drama Translate?” discusses the recent staging of the play by Tomson Highway in Japan and the issues involved in the work’s migration to another linguistic and cultural milieu with its own indigenous peoples. More metaphorically, Laurence Steven’s “Transculturation in George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls: Or, When Is It Appropriate to Appropriate?” argues for the interpretation of métissage as the cultural quilt that makes up this author’s poetic style and the gumbo that constitutes the Canadian identity. Exile and migration are classic representations of cross-cultural transfers. Lucien Pelletier’s interview with poet Robert Dickson, “La migration culturelle de Robert Dickson,” illustrates how cultural migration is independent of distance. Dickson, to whose memory the book is dedicated (see p. xxi), experienced the process …