Translating Beyond Frontiers

The periphery Periphery does not mean sub-culture. Rather, it is a position from where one can look at the center, perhaps intervene in it, but always from a distance. A distance that reflects the dynamism of a potential center as well as the possibility of reaching towards other peripheries. A distance that also creates the perspective one needs to think, to view and eventually to reproduce an object. Periphery is thus a geographical concept, but as well a literary one, the act of translating being in fact a process peripheral to that of writing. Since I live on the periphery, it is as someone from the periphery that I would like to say a few words about translation and literature. Is Canada, and Quebec especially, really on the periphery? No doubt it is. Geographically, socially, culturally and even historically, it lies on the periphery of the Western World, in particular of the giant to the South which, while itself made up of many peripheries, possesses nonetheless the mass and the force of what can only be described as a center, if not the center. This being said, one should be happy to be on the heterogeneous periphery, because a better perspective is often achieved from afar and because there, one more easily finds a vital force that is too often absent at the center. And it is this force, this potentia