Une image pour mille mots?

INFO.:

I just updated my Weebly website, check it out!

http://t.co/UZjdK1d via @weebly

PROFILE: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/nigelspencer

Surprizes...

Books THE WALRUS: SEPT., 09.

How to Read a Masterpiece:                                   Coming to terms with Marie-Claire Blais by   Marianne Ackerman

“Let it wash over you,” the man says. “Like body surfing, let the waves take you. Don’t try to touch bottom, and you won’t hit the rocks.” A burly guy with a voice like timber, Nigel Spencer is sitting at my kitchen table, talking into my tape recorder, addressing my despair. Weeks into this article about one of Canada’s most celebrated writers, a woman whose name is spoken with reverence in literary circles, whose books inspire a steady flow of commentary, and I still can’t get past the first page of her latest novel. Is it possible Marie-Claire Blais could be — as great minds have proclaimed — a genius, and also be unreadable? Or is it me?

. . .

On Being Nigel by Linda Goin.

Posted: 4 April 11 by writingroughdrafts in Updates
Tags: 2011 April PAD Challenge, Africa, yawns

0

He had to ask “Where
did the weekend go?”
Did the time travel to Africa,
where people treat wonder
as a separate emotion?
Or are those days in Kentucky?

Even with Sudoku and scotch,
he lies awake thinking
about the distance
between Africa, Montreal
and Kentucky, where
a woman offers her kidney.

“There’s always something,”
he thinks. “It’s like time-lapse
photography in 4-D,” or,
perhaps, like the time
Ozzie recycled her pets,
serving up fish head stew.

In Africa, Nigel’s friend
filmed a pair of lions
making love. When it was over,
the male yawned. “She looked
like she needed a cigarette.”
A lioness burning bright.

..........................................

EXCERPTS & BIBLIOGRAPHY/FILMOGRAPHY.

-----------

TRANSLATION EXCERPTS 

(followed by bibliography/filmography):
==========================

from ”Ghost of a Voice” in Wintersleep (© 1997) By Marie-Claire Blais. 

Translated by Nigel Spencer
(An earlier version of this translation appeared in THE CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW, Autumn, ©1994.)At rise, there is background music on the cello. At times, it accompanies a man’s voice.  Occasionally, a woman’s voice is heard singing far off,  though very much present.
HE: Everything is silent and peaceful on this mountain…and you’re nearby…. Of course it’s been hard sometimes, but never in all these years together have I felt you waver from me….Why so quiet?
SHE: This magnificent scenery, I was looking at it too. All these years together, difficult, but always together, despite it all. Sort of a miracle, I suppose, but perhaps a miracle others would be afraid of.It’s late. The sun’s going down, and he goes on working. Why such insistence to the very end? If I tell him to rest, he’ll tell me that Mozart followed the score of The Magic Flute on his deathbed. He’s been giving me that answer for years. His passion, music, our passion, our love, our bond, as well as our rivalry.And we’re still here, still together and devoted to one another in our own way, shy and fierce. Yes, it is peaceful here, and at last we have time for ourselves… dangerous maybe.For a long time, we were used to movement, travelling around; yet still he thinks only of his work, his music. It’s often killed our most intimate hours. Strange, since we came here to rest, the atmosphere isn’t the same between us. It’s as if he doubts my love.Before, there used to be a time when he never talked about me. He loved me absently. Recently, he’s been looking at me, perhaps suffering in secret now his conscience is awakening to me, or has he discovered who I really am — that I too have a voice all my own? Is it possible he’s been indiscreet and read those things I wrote in my loneliness on our trips abroad, when I appeared devoted only to him, his career and music, our life together… our only family, our solitude together, too?
HE: I was working alone this morning, while you went walking on the mountain, and I suddenly began thinking about us –about you, especially– and why your destiny was so tied to mine. Why did you agree to live with me? We’ve been through so many trials, and you knew how harsh I could be. Mightn’t you have been freer with another man? More serene? I imagined your life differently –you used to be happier. I realized, maybe for the first time, your depth, the artistic gifts that you never speak about… always there, but which –in the whirlwind of our lives– I have never taken the time to think about. Like every musician, I first had to learn about earning some money, living with dignity. Those aren’t easy things for an unknown composer just starting out. You know that, of course, but still it’s no excuse….Who are you, Anna? What has become of your voice… because you did have a voice of your own, didn’t you?
SHE: A voice. Perhaps just the ghost of a voice now, after all this time spent living with him. Often I think of women from the past, all those voices asleep for so long. Once it must have been hard, with all the patience that was expected, such stoicism and silence. Perhaps I’d never have been strong enough to survive alone. Hasn’t every exceptional woman dreamed, as I have, of one day being a companion and friend to a man of genius? Irresistibly, you awoke my intelligence. I thought that with you I would live the unusual adventure I carried within me. Yet, unknowingly, as I drew closer to you, I approached what I most despised in life: abnegation, suffering. Often I supported and defended you, without believing in the strength of this dream. But your lofty spirit called to me, exalted me. Daily living was a torment I wanted to lighten for you. Thanks to you, I wasn’t just a dead woman’s voice buried with the others. I grew resplendent in your work. I existed; I couldn’t abdicate, not renounce everything.
I often think of those voices from the past, which we no longer know anything about. No man, however exceptional or renowned, should be the one to tell the story of these women, nor bring them to life, these voices of women, of young girls –nameless voices: wives, mothers, troubled women, fearful of joining the murderous cries of the world, cries to the glory of men, their shame at spilling the blood of their children, guilty perhaps to be accomplices in so many horrors — voices of revolt, but guilty of being silent in a time when only Man had life and history, because he was voice and we were silence.
But here I am, and he listens. It is late. At least, he seems to listen.
HE: What a secret story unfolds between two beings. My life is reaching its close, and I sometimes wonder if I haven’t lived only for myself. This creature with me was a disturbing one, troubling and unknown, but I wasn’t aware of her. An artist often spends his youth struggling and nothing else. He sometimes turns mean and blind; some even give up. What does she think of me now? How has she judged me?
Of course, she’ll never say, but the diaries I found, so intimate, tell of a being I still know so very little about… after so many years of music, always music, between us, my only creed, my life and ours… our struggle, our happiness too, which devouring every moment. At first, we had to survive apart. Misfortune sometimes cuts the hardest links. Then we were reduced to petty details, existing, not living.Today, finally, we could rediscover each other: those diaries, those words so long incomprehensible to me. I had the delusion, the arrogance, to say I understood her, but wasn’t she really hiding her truth from me? Wasn’t she really protecting herself? So I must have hurt her then?
SHE: You have read my diaries. Maybe I even wanted you to, so we could be closer. It’s a bit late, don’t you think, to show each other our true faces or hear, really hear, both the voices in this torn, misunderstood dialogue? I used to believe you were only interested in yourself, and then I realized you were absorbed in another life, one that was far from the crowd, perhaps far from love… meditation, work, your work, your music.And yet the world is what it is, and we can’t change it or its engulfing mire of low voices. Reality was always there, like a threat, never leaving you alone, supremely alone. That was only a dream. When they called the music you wrote “barbarous”, how could you answer, defenceless as you were? We live in a barbarous period, but there was a time, you said, when we could take refuge from the world. Now we can’t any more; instead of fleeing, we have to bear witness to the times and write, despite ourselves, a song of denunciation and fury. So you fled here, to the mountains, often without me. Today it’s our refuge, yours and mine, like a silent, breathless link between us. Here you wrote and composed, often late into the night. You followed your own rhythm, like a solitary man, with no wife or children. I’ve often envisioned what would make you happyliving alone, free to create in isolation, with at heart, perhaps, this hope of conquering the world. Isn’t that what your music is after all, an attempt at conquest, calm and silent? From this mountain and wood, you contemplated the celebration you would one day give the universe, their sounds, their beauty and power, a profound story of which you were the master.
========================================================from “Torment” (The Exiles and The Sacred Traveller–© 1999) 
By Marie-Claire Blais

Translated by Nigel Spencer

At this hour of the evening, when the sun set on the ocean, Gentry saw it as a thin smear of blood edging the horizon. He came and went on the uncluttered terrace, between sea and sky, inattentive to the low murmur of nearby customers, or to their vulgar laughter in the cool air of approaching night. These men and women, after drooping all day in the sun’s heat, sated with food and alcohol, had already forgotten the massacres of the war years, massacres Gentry was still running from, always on the lookout for a final refuge, now in this bar that, in a few hours, would look like a deserted backyard opening onto the ocean. Who knows? Maybe one of these disgusting tourists would turn out to be a friend or a classmate from university, come here to nose out his secret and turn him in.
He smiled, put on a cool politeness, an icy fold of a smile under his dark glasses; he might pass for a waiter in his baggy shirt with red flowers, his khaki shorts–just the uniform for a waiter in these southern parts. Besides, who would really remember him from Harvard Medical School in the days when conscientious objectors went to jail? Gentry, handsome, young, and suddenly broken, as if his backbone had given way under the whip in that hellish prison in Peru, where he and other young drug-dealers had continued to meditate on the war that marked them all, whether they were pacifists like him and John, or former soldiers like Freddy and so many more. Hadn’t they all been tarred with the same brush? Who was going to place Gentry under the mask of shades and a distant smile…a murderer or would-be murderer, with that serene and innocent face, suntanned cheeks, and wholesome, good nature? At the neck of his red-flowered shirt there still showed –almost indecent in these barbarous times– a few blonde curls from other days…days when young men still had long hair, soon to be shaved and sent far off, bald and broad-shouldered, many of them never to return.
Suddenly, Gentry’s laugh would transform into a wicked grin: they had killed him; he was not the one who consented to his country’s crimes, who from his plane had burned straw huts and napalmed rice fields. Yet, at night he saw little girls running afire, heard their shrieks and cries of pain in his dreams. He would sleep little, but spend the night walking the streets, and this was just about the hour it began, at evening, when a blood-like foam glistened on the waves. Sometimes a huge one would reach all the way up on the beach and lie right under the terrace where Gentry could see calcinated bodies stirring the dirty water. They filled him with terror and shame, for he had never stopped seeing them, even when he had sunk into a drugged stupor to forget, by the side of the road…in South America…anywhere. He felt overwhelmed by them, as he did by this hellish sunlight, which always seemed like the fires of war and human destruction.
Sometimes, the froth of blood distilled into a golden mist: this was a country of despicable sweetness, he thought. Here, surrounded by this magnificence, forgetting the past and the blood of innocents forever on the horizon, the only feeling possible was selfish contentment. Was he really the only one of his generation who could still sense this buried curse? Was it mainly because he hadn’t saved John from his killers in their South American jail? He had escaped, hadn’t he, and left John to be tortured by the guards and finally executed with a bullet to the back of the neck. These tormentors would kill for a little stolen cocaine, and John, barely out of adolescence, was vulnerable, easy prey. It came soon after the butchery of the war, thought Gentry, and even when they’d been running free out on the highway, hadn’t they seen it everywhere, this troubling sun, reddening the horizon? Weren’t they sure of an early death, these “flower children”, ardent pacifists and conscientious objectors in search of a just peace? Gentry wondered if there ever could be a just peace and order in such a bloody world. Hadn’t they all been sacrificed, along with the other victims of the nasty war no one talked about any more?
========================================================from THUNDER AND LIGHT (© 2001) By Marie-Claire Blais.
Translated by Nigel Spencer: Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation–2002
Polly brushed her head against Carlos’ feet–these were her refuge from danger, beating the air, their soles pink and curved in rubber sandals–and sand on the beach damp from ocean and salt, dust from the streets moistened by the robustness of his body and the speed of his step…what unfamiliar noises, shouts and rumblings hung suspended around Polly and Carlos as they ran side-by-side (Polly knew the cruelty of unavoidable destiny, an arrow strung to the life of every living creature): Bahama Street, Esmeralda Street, her faith in life was instinctive, she proudly bared her teeth for Carlos–greedy they were, too–and her tongue, with which she licked the undersides of his feet, Carlos, her refuge, her lair, she raised an angry face skyward to show him…that Lazaro, I’ll get him one of these days, Polly, he shouted, so, you’re going to follow me everywhere, are you, Polly? and Polly saw those large hands of Carlos’, yesterday so supple and ready to caress, now tightening into clenched fists, and where were they headed anyway, running like this under a scorching sun, Lazaro’s watch, he murmured, that Egyptian, that Moslem immigrant on Bahama, always smothered in gifts by his mother in Cairo, he wants me to give it back to him, him with his bicycle, his digital watch, and that King Tut fetish he wears round his neck, but no, he’s got to have his Adidas watch back, and every night he lies in wait for me to ask for it, Polly heard him go on bitterly between clenched teeth, and if he doesn’t let up, I’ll lean on him, scare him, him with his Cuban guns and no ammo, Lazarro the Egyptian, you’d better not follow me there, Polly, and where on earth were they going in this leaden heat before the storm, the tempest, wasn’t it time to be tackling the waves, this dream of water throbbed all around Polly’s sweat-covered head as she heard other dogs barking in the distance, as she followed Carlos, panting, glued to the pink underside of his feet, Carlos, her refuge, her shelter from danger and annihilation, because anything, however savage, could befall her in a second on Bahama Street or Esmeralda Street, as rival gangs fought it out, Carlos and Lazarro the Egyptian, inseparable only yesterday, Carlos, Lazarro and Venus with her iguana on a yellow leash, staring at the ocean, feverish from the burning air…no, thought Venus, the Captain her husband wouldn’t be home tonight, the huge bed covered in silk cushions would be deprived of that unbridled lust of his for a long time yet, his late-blooming love so often haunted by the thought of death, the green iguana and the affectionate Dachshund, now without a master, went everywhere with Venus, when she wandered all alone through the cedar-wood house, opening cupboards that held Williams’ things laid out on the shelves, possessions dear to him that Venus left in untroubled silence, his extensive collection of seaman’s caps, pipes of exotic shapes from which she could still smell the contaminated odour of islands ruined by the White Man’s passing, she slid along the hallways of the house, its walls covered with the Captain’s lascivious paintings, the painter-musician-adventurer who had sometimes asked Venus to pose for them with an obscenity so candid it moved them both to laughter, liberated from Pastor Jeremy’s sermons, yet Venus could still hear the powerful voice of her father remonstrating that he never would set foot in Venus’ house, a house where a young female escort at the Club Mix, only fifteen years old, had consummated her marriage to a man easily forty years older, a phoney captain with a such a shady reputation that even his disappearance at sea was suspect, Mama just didn’t know if she could forgive Venus for all these foul-ups, after all, didn’t she have enough to worry about with Carlos and the gang-fights on Bahama and Esmeralda; since that Egyptian, Lazaro had come on the scene, he was always getting himself into fights, Carlos, her baby, in some no-good outfit, Venus perched the green iguana, like a peeling crown, on top of her head, its paws overlapping her forehead, and laughing, she said no predator’s going to catch you by the tail up there, although the voice of Pastor Jeremy still sounded in her ears, echoing as it used to do around the Temple of the City of Coral, if–as her father preached in his sermons–the serpent was the tempting Devil of the Scriptures, why was Captain Williams, the man Venus had chosen over everyone else at the Club Mix, why hadn’t he been among those in the jungle where she tamed snakes and iguanas, that serpent she had charmed with the sweet airs of her voice, seduced in fact, the pastor said, because long before this she had been seducing men, and the Captain was tough, not tender, she thought to herself, but what could a zealous father know of a free-living man who lavished the flame of his passion and the jumble of his riches on a black girl: a cedar-wood house Venus thought she would never escape from, cared for by Richard the estate-manager, this house and its works of art–libidinous bits of wreckage salvaged from the varied stops the Captain had made in every port in the islands, why did this man, a man with some charitable principles, thought Venus, why did he have to wind up like all the other captains whose bodies the crews had to bring home some morning under a fluttering black flag, on board his own ship and headed for the tepid waters of the canal…lined with arborescent vines, grasses and ferns…the kingdom of of iguanas and water-snakes, Mama and her eight children, after all, didn’t they live crammed into a single room when Venus would have preferred to put them all up in her villa, but, no, the Pastor had repeated, never will we enter Venus’ house, alone for so long, Venus had awaited the return of a ghost whose voice she still heard in fragments, wouldn’t he just step out of the mangrove mists one day, this Captain of hers, the way drunken, dope-dealing sailors sometimes did when they slid onto shore in their tipsy boats, soon his home–its terrain being gradually swallowed up by the waters–would play host to a charity party, Venus was thinking, a bazaar for the kids who had to go off to school on Bahama Street with no food in their stomachs and no smallpox, meningitis or any other kinds of shot, all the town’s bigwigs would be her guests…all those who had looked down on her when she’d accompanied Uncle Cornelius, singing in taverns and dingy cabarets…Venus was the wife of a hero who, so he said (and she knew he wasn’t lying), would never hesitate to kill a dangerous rival in order to defend her honour, and who knows, maybe that’s how he’d lost his life, maybe he had killed for her or been struck himself some stormy night and drowned in the swollen waters, everyone had envied their happiness, their lush paradise where birds ate from Venus’ hand, sparrows and hummingbirds taking the fleshy fruit, pink melon with sweet juice trickling through her fingers, but better not think about it, the picture of Venus’ honour being defended by a crime out on the ocean, no, she said to the green iguana crawling through her hair, and to the Dachshund sniffing the wild scents on her tattooed ankles, no, here no predator would come, and the Dachshund, now feeling playful all of a sudden, jumped at her feet, focussed on the clicking sound made by her anklets as she walked toward the beach, the Captain’s boat tied up in the waves, nervous before the rain, the iguana–which seemed to have fallen asleep in her hair–opened its large, bulbous eyes and looked all around from out of wrinkles made by long-ago apprehensions and from under the rough, leathered skin of its eyelids, the iguana on its yellow leash listened to Venus’ laughing voice as she said, no predator can reach you, a voice that echoed in its heart, under its armour, like the call of freedom in the heart of a prisoner, the captive iguana heard the rustling of water, of insects, of marshes where reeds and climbing plants criss-crossed, far off the time when the iguana crawled on its short legs and belly toward the world of men or over beaches, no, she had been tamed to decorate their rock gardens and pool-sides, here no predator could come, Venus said, the lizard, the iguana, the crocodile lived alone in the thick scrub of the savannahs and forests, in the giant grasses of the hot and humid brushlands. The bus was tearing along, deep into the high regions of the Pyrenees, when Mother said to Mélanie (who was old enough for her First Communion, done up for the trip–as they all were–in a white dress and crinoline) don’t turn around, Mélanie. Don’t look back at the procession by the side of the road, one of them has been hit, a fine-scaled butterfly caught by a passing car, and wasn’t it because of the dress and crinoline, that white armour mothers dress their daughters in for their First Communions, that the little girl was killed that day, Mélanie thought later on, the negligence of a drunk driver, a disaster conceived and inflicted by heaven on that radiant afternoon in the hollows of these snowy mountains and glaciers, and now a butterfly caught in the trap of joy, Mother had said to Mélanie, for one moment, these children were singing and humming, the next, the sun seemed to grow pale, and the mountains to tremble with fear, Mélanie hearing all around her nothing but the silence of glaciers, and the bus careering up the spiralled mountain roads, and so quickly the communicants were scattered in a broken chain of brilliant white along the highway…
========================================================from TIGHTROPE (© 2006) By Pauline Michel. 
Translated by Nigel Spencer.
========================================================from HAUNTED CHILDHOODS (© 2006) By Pauline Michel. 
Translated by Nigel Spencer.
========================================================from  AUGUSTINO AND THE CHOIR OF DESTRUCTION (© 2007) By Marie-Claire Blais.Translated by Nigel Spencer--Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation–2007.Petites Cendres smelled with disgust, she said, the drunken man’s breath on her lips and neck, as this stranger pinned her to the wall of the bar: stop, will you, you’re going to suffocate me, what could she say to be safe, no one had any respect for her, the man who had arranged to meet her in the hotel at eight this evening and his strange accent had a heavy violence, a fleshy weight whose oppressiveness she had glimpsed, bald head she didn’t like either, nor the baggy eyes of this stranger under his silver-rimmed glasses, leave me alone, Petites Cendres said again, thinking of how she had to drop by briefly at the Porte du Baiser Saloon where she danced every day for customers as dull as this one squeezing her waist and flattening her against the wall, she could see the pink wooden houses lit by the sun on Esmerelda Street and Bahama Street, a dog sniffing vainly for any trace of the owner who had abandoned it, why didn’t he just head for the sea, at least there’d be some coolness, he probably hadn’t eaten for days she thought, his colour, his colour was the same as hers too, not brown, not black, but at least if she didn’t eat it was simply from lack of appetite, she had all she needed from the shade and the vented air in the Saloon, fed also by what had become her unfilled need, yes, the dog was a dark ochre colour like rust, just like Petites Cendres, nobody was going to feel sorry for him, too old, forty they all said, too late, the man was dragging her out into the street, and she was ashamed that everyone would see her now, hear her whimpering, leave me alone you kids, because that’s what they called her, Ashley, hey Little Ashes…Petites Cendres…forty years old and you’re teetering on the brink, laughing as they called out the numbers coming up in the Saloon that night, in their evening clothes and stiletto heels, coarse heavily built men, she thought, but they don’t give a damn what happens to me, they’ll see, they’ll see later on, nobody gets respect at this age, nobody, and one of the boys who didn’t have a wig, yawning on the sidewalk, no wig, just earrings and short, slicked-back hair, she noticed, he just thought it was funny the john’s tattooed arm across her throat, then he tapped the drunk on the shoulder, hey loosen up on her a bit, will you, you don’t want her to croak on us, do you, and the man shook himself out of his stupor and flung her onto the sidewalk like a rag, don’t forget…be at the hotel by eight, girl, he said; that’s it, show him you’re a man yelled the bare-headed, kid with no wig, so are you a man, I’m the man that I am, the way the Lord made me, said Petites Cendres as he watched the bottom-feeder slouch away from him, yes, that’s how he made you all right, said the kid with no wig, bit stuck-up aren’t you Ashley, with those jeans so tight on your skanky ass, your black corset, the zits on your face, your plastic tits, aintcha got a little angel-dust for me while you’re at it, it’s a black silk corset, he said, and I am just the way I am, you get nothing from me, the kid with no wig went on, watch out for your john, he looks like a wrestler in the ring, get a load of that ox-neck of his, he’ll beat you to a pulp, afraid are you, Ashley, come on and prove you’re a man, then they all started laughing again, in their evening wear, Petites Cendres did not know if they were just indolent, mean or ferocious, he saw the sea glittering under an incandescent sun at the far end of the long, narrow street, on the shoreline of Atlantic Boulevard, any moment now that sun would burst into a ball of flame, a furnace to stifle the heart of Petites Cendres, his soul felt blood-raw, liquefied deep down inside him, in a pale, cold sea where the need that gnawed at him would break your heart, a fire burnt out, his heart, that dog should not have been there on Esmeralda or Bahama Street, hunger tottering on all fours, night-prowling around the Porte du Baiser Saloon where he just would not stop living despite all odds; in thunder and light, Lazaro launched his boat from the side of the wharf, thinking he would rather work at sea than be a student and live with his mother Caridad and those brothers and sisters of his, all of them born here of a man not his father, not even a Moslem, his mother had betrayed him by pardoning Carlos for his murderous act against her son, none of them, not one, knew who this Lazaro really was, sitting, hatching his revenge against Carlos, ready to kill him when he got out of jail, unless of course Justice did it for him, oh yes, maybe Justice would be fair and kill Carlos, then Lazaro would be recruited for some grander mission, and not only Carlos would disappear but all the others, Caridad the charitable who mangled the faith of their ancestors, her pardon was just a caricature of pity, there should be pity for no one, not Carlos or the others, from a grumpy fisherman resigned to working the sea with his hands, a student with no diploma, Lazaro would become someone, someone…who knows what, he needed a pitiless role, one to light a fire under the whole of the earth, he had written to his uncles and cousins, recruit me, I’ll volunteer, be a missionary for some dark work, for he had known from childhood, hadn’t he, that one day the earth would belong to the militant and soldier tribes alone, no more women, certainly none like his mother, Caridad–changing countries so they could unveil their faces and drive cars–none of these any more…the sullen, strong-willed, dry and thirsty planet would be reserved for the young and angry, those destined to sensitive missions of martyrdom, thousands of them, unnamed and unnameable, candidates for suicide, flourishing in disordered ranks world-wide, staging attacks anywhere and everywhere–supermarkets in Jerusalem, hotels in New York–they would be heard if not believed, because of the panache of their murders, the toll rung by the belt-activated bombs they all would conceal under their clothes and in handbags, girls breaking off engagements and hiding mortar-shells beneath folds of scarves, in bags, at store entrances, in stations, holding them so close to their own organs, these innumerable unnamed brigades alone would inherit the earth, bombs would be housed in their young and healthy bodies and reign holy terror, oh yes, in whole cities, on tiled floors in cafeterias of Hebrew universities, squads of nurses would lean over pools of blood–here seven people died–quickly wrap them in sheets just as quickly soaked in blood, and still gloved, the nurse would take the wheel and drive home to his family at night, something sticky still on his fingers…ah, he would say, may God have pity on this blood; in every town and village, on walls of homes and schools, there would be pictures of suicide-bombers with crowns of flowers, brigades of pious volunteers, nurses constantly on call and on the move to massacre-sites, gloved alike, and surgeon-like, would say that blood is the seat of the soul, and like the kamikazes these new angels of death would become heroes subjected to a familiar ritual, here, in this cafeteria, seven people died, and now the pile of bodies must be removed amid shards of glass, broken tables, and tomorrow it would be the same thing somewhere else, in a bar another woman would be sitting with her elbow on the counter, eyes open, glass in hand, a marbled statue in sudden death, tomorrow more streets and houses, tanks splitting the pavement, footsteps in the smoking dust of exploded houses, such was the world Lazaro had contemplated since childhood, or it might have been when his father Mohammed beat his mother before he was born, blows that came from a long way off, when his mother said, we must get away from Egypt, this country, this man…might there be still more streets and houses or gassy smells, smoke billowing from the sky, I’ll get him, I’ll get that Carlos one of these days, Lazaro said to himself over and over as he walked down Atlantic Boulevard, the sun was red as it prepared to vanish into the sea, the air was so sweet you’d think you were swallowing it and getting drunk; Lazaro waded barefoot through the sea, his body shaking with rage as he soaked his face and hair in the salt water, remembered Carlos, and heard a heavy flapping of wings, the sudden, troubled passing of a wounded pelican, frightened and desperately try to scoop up fish and stay alive, still lumbering awkwardly over the water, but seeming only to skim the hard surface of the waves with his beak, the sound of his one good wing racketing skywards, Lazaro climbed the stairs to a terrace and tried to get help for the wounded bird, thinking petulantly that his mother would have done the same, talking on and on as she did about respecting nature, Lazaro spotted the bird from the terrace, apparently staying close to shore, looking for shelter beneath a bridge, flying more and more lamely and panicked now, the weakened pelican suddenly abandoned the protection of the shoreline and headed for open water, and Lazaro could no longer see the yellow-gold plumage of the bird’s head, as though some malevolent fate had snatched the endangered bird away from him, he felt a moment’s anguish, this world of small and larger birds that could be seen in the wakes of boats, sailboats used by fishermen, and wasn’t this after all the last domain which could still win Lazaro over with its vitality, its diversity and its courage in the face of an uncertain ocean, a world not yet reflecting a dark, deathly light like the mission he could not stop thinking about–avenging himself on Carlos or the militant action he wanted to carry out–when these thoughts of his future were frequently fleshed out and freighted with primitive foreshadowings, this majestic world of birds for instance, he came close to fainting, he thought, and Mère, whose birthday they were celebrating, heard daughter Mélanie saying to Jermaine’s parents, oh but Jermaine doesn’t play with Samuel any more…before yes, but not now, he’s a handsome young man whose Asian features resemble his mother more an more, but didn’t he just spoil it all, thought Mère by bleaching his hair blonde like that and making it stick straight up on his head, Mélanie was saying, women must learn to govern, we need a woman president, because when men are in charge they start wars, but Chuan replied that when women governed, they could be just as cruel and ambitious as men, think about those “enlightened despots” said Jermaine’s mother, like Catherine the Great, they crushed an entire population of serfs and peasants under feudalism, entirely indifferent to the suffering of their people, and it’s often been that way–even nowadays–oh, I don’t mean you, Mélanie dear, we could never get enough of your sincerity in the Senate, but my husband, one of the first black senators ever elected, won’t tolerate any talk of politics in this house, and now he’s retired, he channels his protest through writing, often alone in the cottage over by the ocean there…just down the path and through the hibiscus from the house…he often phones me, and we talk several times a day, when I’m not off designing in Paris or Milan or Hong Kong, his real home is here on this island near his family, Olivier’s not a nomad like me, Mère told Chuan how delighted she was by her house and everything she created by way of decoration, Chuan knew how to pare things down to their essential forms, and her houses in the Dominican Republic and here, facing the ocean, were as light as Thai cottages out on the water which reflected onto the white blinds of the living room, air wafting through the row of palm trees in the garden, luxuriance and weightlessness, Mère said, thinking neither of her daughter nor of Chuan to whom she addressed these polite words, but seeming to ask herself vague questions, or rather afraid to ask them, at almost eighty, she had made a success of her life, though what that meant for a woman she wasn’t sure…on her deathbed with an insidious anaemia, Marie Curie had told her daughter Eve, “I don’t want what you’re going to do to me. I just want to be left alone,” and Mère too wondered what will they do to me when they see my right hand trembling, and some other things are not quite right, Mélanie, who notices everything, what will she do to me, I want to be left alone, her last words must be like those of the great apostle of pure science, “I do not wish it,” but it wasn’t about to happen any time soon, you never change, Esther dear, they always told her as she sipped her cocktail in the warm breeze, naturally, I still have plenty of time to think about all that, “Sleep,” Marie Curie had said as she closed her eyes, sleep. Yet Marie Curie was a woman of renown, the Mozart of science, Mère thought, but still, born a woman, she might not have thought her life a success, is it possible she left his world with doubts, saying over and over to her daughter that she wanted to be left in peace, not bothered any more, that this life was just too much, so many tribulations, so little grandeur, just too much to bear, she would die with the true scale of her work unknown, just to be allowed to sleep at least, might an accomplished life go hand-in-hand with success, Maria Sklodowska’s childhood in Poland had not been especially promising, brothers and sisters dying around her of tuberculosis or typhus, very early on she became an agnostic and had to do without whatever support was not as solid as science, the disappearance of God, the loss of her parents…all this left her mind free and clear, Maria knew this, the straightforwardness of thought alone would yield rewards, no wandering across snowy fields, no sleigh rides for this little girl, perhaps the companionship of a dog in her study, wars and insurrections had drained the world of its blood, but through the dark emerged the thoughts of one who did not yet know who she was, she could not say with the authority of others before her, I am Darwin, I am Mendeleyev–their theories had penetrated her mind even before she knew who she was, what was success in life, born like Marie Curie, in Poland oppressed by the Russians, and no voting rights for women, in England or anywhere else, to discover as one grew older that academicians and intellectuals were imprisoned in Siberia, then to be swept up in an era of positivity when the emancipation of women would be justified, or be assassinated for revolutionary politics like her friend Rosa Luxembourg, whose young body would be found floating in a Berlin canal, what was success in life, wondered Mère, knowing how to design, plan and build harmonious coral pathways–as Chuan had done in front of her house–or being Rosa Luxembourg , the falterings, the failings bearing down on Maria’s life, whether teacher or housewife, poverty ground people down everywhere, were the grumblings and ingratitude of others all she could ever expect? In this far-away Polish village, so alone in her mansard-roofed cottage that one had to get to it in winter by a stairway, she devoured literature and natural science, read in French and Russian, got up at five in the grey dawn, stuck doggedly to her physics and math books, still not knowing who she was, a failed schoolteacher, a creature petrified by the sheer concentration of all her faculties, waiting under that mansard roof for her father to send her money from home, and when none came, she sent her own salary to help her brother with his studies, in her isolation, Maria wrote to her family that she had no plans for the future, or at least such banal ones they were not worth mentioning, she would get by as best she could, and one day, so she wrote, she would bid farewell to this petty life, and the harm would not be great, neither Darwin nor Freud, just an ordinary being, it was the time of year when everything was frozen, the sky, the earth, there was revulsion against any physical contact, this too she felt, and why mend your clothes when there was no one to dress up for, nerves were the last thing alive under that ice and clothing and body and soul, all lying uncared-for beneath this deathless winter, the spark came from learning chemistry, though she had written her brother that she had given up all hope of ever becoming someone, failure, thought Mère, yes, the unbearable failure of every successful life, the ascetic face of Maria Sklodowska bent over her work and assembling so many pictures and voices that Mère no longer found her way through them, Chuan had taken her by the arm and was inviting her to meet the guests she called her European group, writers and artists newly arrived on our island…
==========================

========================================================== From RU by Kim Thuy in Words Without Borders (Chicago) May, 2009. 
English translation--Nigel Spencer (© 2009).
http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-ru/#ixzz1TuRgLMud
I came into the world early in the Year of the Monkey, during the Tet Offensive, when long strings of fireworks hanging from the houses exploded in polyphony with the sound of machine guns.
Saigon was my birthplace, and thousands of bits of old firecrackers covered the soil in red as if they were petals from a cherry tree, or the blood of two million soldiers, scattered through the towns and villages of a Vietnam torn in two.
I was born in the shadows of skies embroidered with fireworks, hung in luminous garlands shot through with rockets and missiles. My birth was to replace the lost lives. My life was to prolong my mother’s.
*
My name is Nguyên An Tinh, and my mother’s, Nguyên An Tinh. The tiny variation of a dot under the i sets us apart, makes me distinct, for I was an extension of her, right down to the meaning of my name. In Vietnamese, hers meant “peaceful surroundings,” and mine meant “peaceful inner world.” Through these almost interchangeable names, my mother confirmed me as an outgrowth of herself, the continuation of her story.
The history of Vietnam, with a capital H, upset her plans though. When she took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago, those accents were dropped in the water. She also stripped our names of their meaning, making them merely strange and foreign sounds when pronounced in French. Above all, she overthrew my role as a natural extension of her from the age of ten.
*
Exile made it so my children would never be extensions of either my story or myself. Their names are Pascal and Henri, and they look nothing like me. They have light-colored hair, white skin and thick eyelashes. The natural maternal instinct just wasn’t there when they hung onto my breasts at three in the morning. That came much later, after many sleepless nights, dirty diapers, candid smiles, and unexpected joys.
Then, and only then, was I swept up in the love of a mother sitting across from me in the hold of our boat, clutching a baby with a head covered in scabs and stinking sores. I have held that picture in my head for days and perhaps nights as well. One small bulb hanging from a cord held in place by a rusty nail cast a weak light, always the same, through the hold. In the depths of the boat, day and night were one, and the ever-faithful light sheltered us from the immensity of sea and sky surrounding us. People sitting on the bridge told us there was no visible line between the blue of sea and sky any more. There was no way to know if we were rearing skyward or plunging to the depths. Heaven and hell met in a single embrace within the belly of our ship. Heaven held out the promise of change, a new future, a new story for our lives. Hell, though, became our fears: pirates, hunger, intoxication on biscuits soaked in motor oil, lack of water, not being able to stand again, having to urinate in the red pot that was passed from hand to hand, possible contagion from the child’s scabby head, never stepping on dry land again, never again seeing the faces of family members sitting in the dark somewhere in the middle of two hundred others.
*
Before we weighed anchor in the middle of the night on the shores of Rach Giá, most of the passengers had only one fear: the communists. This is who they were fleeing, but once surrounded, encircled by a uniform blue horizon, fear became a monster with a hundred faces, that amputated our legs and prevented us from feeling how stiff our cramped muscles really were. We were frozen in fear, by fear. We no longer even closed our eyes when the scabby-headed baby peed in our faces. We no longer held our noses when our neighbours vomited. We were numbed and imprisoned by the shoulders of some, the legs of others, and everyone’s fear. We were paralyzed.
The story of the little girl who went for a walk on the rim of the deck, lost her footing and was swallowed up by the sea flowed through the odorous belly of the boat like an anesthetic or laughing gas that transformed the one light bulb into a pole star and the oil-soaked dried slices of bread into the loveliest of tea-biscuits. The taste of oil in one’s head and throat and on one’s tongue put us to sleep to the rhythm of a lullaby sung by our neighbour.
*
My first glimpses of snowbanks through the porthole at Mirabel Airport made me feel bare and defenceless. The short-sleeved orange pullover from the refugee camp in Malaysia and the loose-knit brown woolen sweater made by Vietnamese women still left me completely exposed. Several of us rushed to the windows of the plane, mouths and eyes wide in amazement. After having lived for so long in unlit places, such a white, virginal landscape was daz zling, blinding, even intoxicating.
I was also stunned by the foreign sounds that wel comed us, by the size of the ice sculpture that kept watch over the table of canapés, hors d’œuvres, and snacks of all shapes and colours. I didn’t recognize a single one of them, though I realized this had to be a land of delights and dreams. Just like my son Henri now, I could say or understand nothing, though I was not deaf or dumb. I had lost all reference points, lost all ways to dream or project into the future, even to live in the present.
*
My first teacher in Canada accompanied us, the seven youngest Vietnamese, across the bridge which took us to the present. She oversaw our transplantation with the delicacy of a mother for a premature infant. We were hypnotized by the slow, reassuring sway of her round hips and fully curved behind. Like a mother duck, she marched ahead, inviting us to follow her to the haven where we would become children once again, just children, surrounded by colours and drawings and trifles. I will always be grateful to her for my very first immigrant wish: to be able to sway the fat on my behind just like her. None of the Vietnamese in our group was endowed with such generous and nonchalant curves. We were all hard, bony, and angular. So when she leaned over me, placed her hands on mine and said, “My name is Marie-France; what is yours?” I repeated each syllable without blinking, not even needing to understand, but just feeling lulled by a cloud of freshness, lightness and sweet perfume. I did not understand the words she spoke, but I did under stand the melody of her voice, and that was more than enough.
*
Once we were in our home, I repeated the same sequence of sounds to my parents: “My name is Marie-France; what is yours?” They asked me if I’d changed my name, and that was the instant the present caught up with me, when the deafness and muteness of the moment erased my dreams and, with them, the ability to see far, far ahead.
My parents already spoke French, but even so, they couldn’t see far ahead either; they’d been expelled from their Beginners’ French course, meaning no payment of 40 dollars a week, because they were over qualified for this course but underqualified for every thing else. Unable to look ahead for themselves, they looked ahead for their children instead.
*
Because of us, they did not see the blackboards they cleaned or the school toilets they washed or the imperial rolls they delivered. They saw only our future. My brothers and I moved forward by following the trails of their gaze. I have met parents whose gaze has been extinguished under the weight of a pirate’s body, or from too many years in communist re-education camps—not war camps during wartime, but postwar camps during peace time.
*
When I was little, I believed war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace while Vietnam was on fire and knew war only after it laid down its weapons. I believe war and peace are actually friends that mock us. They treat us as enemies when they want, as they want, regardless of what definitions we give them. We cannot trust appearances where they are concerned. I was fortunate in having parents who could maintain their outlook, no matter the particular complexion of the times; my mother often quoted the proverb on her eighth-grade black board in Saigon: “Ðòi là chiên trân, nêu buôn là thua– Life is a struggle, and the price of sadness is defeat.”
*
My mother wanted me to speak and to learn French as quickly as possible, English too, since my mother tongue had become, not ridiculous, but useless. In my second year in Québec, she sent me to an English-speaking cadet barracks. A way to learn English free, she said. She was wrong. There was nothing free about it, and it cost me dearly. There were about forty of them, all big, lively, and most of all, adolescent. They’d take themselves oh-so-seriously as they minutely examined the fold of a collar, the angle of a beret or the shine of a boot. The older ones yelled at the younger ones. They’d played at war, at absurdity, without understanding, without knowing. I couldn’t imagine why the name of the person next to me in line was endlessly repeated by our superior. Why would he want me to remember the name of this kid who was twice my size. My very first English conversation started with the greeting, “Bye, Asshole.”
*
When the communists entered Saigon, my family gave up half their property because we had become vulnerable. A brick wall was put up to separate the two addresses: one for us and one for the neighborhood police station. A year later, the author ities of the new communist administration came back for the rest of our house and us, what was left of us. Inspectors came into our yard without warning or warrant or reason and asked everyone there to meet in the living room. My parents were away, so the inspectors sat on the edges of the straight-backed Art-Deco chairs and waited without once touching the two finely embroidered white-linen squares which lay on the arms. My mother was the first to appear at the glass-and-forged-iron door. She had on her white pleated miniskirt and running shoes. My father, just behind her, was carrying the tennis rackets, his face covered in perspiration. This impromptu visit from the inspectors propelled us forward into the present; until now, we had been savoring one final taste of the past. All the adults were asked to remain in the living room while inventory was taken.
We kids could follow them from floor to floor, room  by room. They sealed dressers, cupboards, dressing-tables, strongboxes. They even sealed the big dresser my grandmother and her six daughters kept for their brassieres, though they didn’t write down the description of the contents. I thought that maybe the young inspector was embarrassed by the thought of all these round-breasted girls sitting around in the living room dressed in fine Parisian silk. I also thought he left that page blank because he was too overcome by desire to write, but I was wrong: he didn’t know what a brassiere was. He thought they looked like his moth er’s coffee filters, stitched round a metal hoop ended with a handle.
At the foot of Long Biên Bridge, which crosses the Red River in Hanoi, his mother filled her coffee filter before soaking it in the aluminum pot so she could sell cups to passersby. In winter, she kept her glasses, which contained about three mouthfuls each, in a bowl of hot water to keep the chill off them while the men chatted on benches that were barely raised off the ground. Customers could spot her by the flame from the tiny oil lamp on her tiny table, next to three cigarettes in a dish on display. Every morning, the young inspector, still a child really, awoke with a much reused brown coffee filter, still damp, hanging from a nail above his head. I heard him in conversation with the other inspectors in a stairway corner. He could not understand why my family had so many coffee filters filed away in drawers lined with tissue paper. And why were they doubled up? Was that because one always drinks coffee with a friend?
In high school, I remember hearing students complaining about their history class. We were young. We did not know that only a country at peace could afford history classes. Elsewhere, people are too busy with their day-to-day survival to devote time to the writing of their shared story. If I had not lived in the majestic silence of great frozen lakes, in the daily monotony of peacetime, with love celebrated in balloons, confetti, and chocolate, I would probably never have noticed the arched back of the old woman who lived near my great-grandfather’s grave in the Mekong Delta. She was old, so very old that her sweat ran down her wrinkles like a gentle and persistent stream furrowing the earth. One step at a time, she walked down the stairs backward in order to keep her balance and avoid plunging forward, head first. How many grains of rice has she planted? How long has she kept her feet in the mud? How many times has she witnessed the sun setting on her rice field? How many dreams has she abandoned to find herself bent double thirty years, forty years later?
We tend to forget these women who have borne Vietnam on their backs while their men bore guns on theirs. We forget them because under their cone-shaped hats they never looked up to the sky. They only waited for the sun to beat down upon them so they could pass out instead of falling asleep. If they had let sleep come to them, they would have had time to picture their sons blown into pieces or their husbands floating on a river like pieces of wreckage. The slaves of the cotton fields knew how to chant out their pain, but these women only let their sadness grow inside the chambers of their heart. The weight of their grief made them so heavy they could no longer stand up straight. Even after the men had come back from the jungle, walking the dikes again, circling the rice fields, these women continued to carry the weight of the inaudible story of Vietnam on their backs. More often than not, they would disappear in silence under this weight.
The woman I knew died by losing her footing while sitting in an open-air toilet built over a catfish pond. Her plastic slippers skidded on one of the two wooden planks. If someone had been watching, he would have seen her cone-shaped hat suddenly drop behind the four wood panels that barely hid her crouching body. The panels surrounded her without protecting her. She died in her septic tank, right behind her hut. She fell between two planks and drowned in a hole of excrement as the catfish with their yellowed flesh, slippery skin, no scales and no memory rallied around her.

======================

from REBECCA: BORN IN THE MAELSTROM (© 2010) By Marie-Claire Blais. 
Translated by Nigel Spencer.  (LONG-LISTED FOR THE DUBLIN IMPAC AWARD, 2011.)
========================================================from FEET OF THE ANGELS (© 2011) By Evelyne de la Chenelière. 
Translated by Nigel Spencer.

MARIE (1): at the microphone, holding a sheet of paper. She is nervous, trembling and dry in the mouth:
Let me begin by thanking you, Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the jury, for having read my work so attentively and also for your comments. Let me express my gratitude and affection to all those who have been generous enough to attend today and share my last moments as a student, officially, I mean.
(She catches her breath, coughs, swallows and tries to relax.)
There are so very many ways to approach the Renaissance: a revolution in all our senses, a conjunction of all types of knowledge, so much an integral part of our lives, our perceptions and all our forms of expression. Our accumulated research has forced us, time after time, to acknowledge the impossibility of embracing the totality of what appears to us as significant, fundamental and enlightening about it. It has been necessary to extract from all this one small aspect of the immeasurable upheaval in an attempt to isolate, at least partially, the fallout from the Renaissance that would forever colour man’s relation to his existence. If the Renaissance is first and foremost a period of great exploration, of the spread of knowledge and the end of obscurantism, it is also paradoxically the time of a disenchantment that echoes the very first humanist values, for this new fascination with the self–a creative self certainly, but no less mortal and limited–is a cult necessarily tinged with melancholy. Such adoration of man by man, at the root of the first self-portraits and artists’ biographies, resonates today more than ever with the boundless glorification of humankind, quite apart from whatever its accomplishments and exploits may be. Thus have we chosen to concentrate on a specific aspect of systematic humanization in Renaissance art, part of what we may call “the archeology of image” or more precisely, “the archeology of representation”.
Before going further, however, let us mention the origin of this interest in a particular detail, which however intimate, constitutes, beyond any personal aspect, an analogy with the thesis…here defended.
(We sense that she is no longer looking at what she has written, her eyes wandering from the paper…)
MARIE (2): But I changed my mind, that is…I mean…I didn’t really want to be here any more, talking, drawing you into my subject, defending…I…it seemed more than I could handle. That’s what I wanted to say five minutes ago. I wanted to tell you, it’s nothing personal, but I can’t stand you looking at me, and all of a sudden it…oh, I know you’re just doing what’s expected of you; it’s what you have to do, but this convention that makes you…makes us…me…that’s what I mean. I’ll go on of course, no need to panic…I can do it…but I just felt I had to share this with you, make things clear. Right, yes, I’ll go on now. Um, I mean I’ll start.
My brother died when I was still a child, and ever since, I’ve been fascinated with angels. I was sure he had become an angel himself, and that reassured me. That was when I decided to collect them…angels. I acquired dozens of awful dust-gatherers: cherubim, archangels and seraphim at first. Then as I developed a more refined taste, I lost interest in them. 
Instead, I became interested in the portrayal of angels in paintings.
MARIE (1): …while studying Art History, research led to the discovery of Giotto. It became apparent that angels were practically flying trunks with no feet under them, sometimes cut off at the knees, or at least hidden by their long, flowing robes that were tattered at the bottom, almost as if someone had chewed them off or set fire to them. Thus we wondered what had deprived them of their feet, 
and most of all, who had veiled them, torn them off, burned or devoured them.
The dying swan.
A deceased young man lies in his casket. Behind it, a giant screen, where we see Anna Pavlova performing “the dying swan”. The young man gets up and awkwardly climbs out of the coffin. He faces the screen, back to the audience, and tries to imitate Pavlova. Marie (2) and her mother do not see him. Although facing the audience, they are evidently watching the screen too. While talking, they never take their eyes off it.
MONIQUE: “A message of beauty and joy in living,” It was Anna Pavlova herself who said that, “ dance as a message of beauty and joy in living,” eh?
MARIE (2): Yes Mama.
MONIQUE: It’s as though she’s floating and flying, don’t you think?
MARIE (2): Yes I do.
MONIQUE: Just hanging in mid-air.
MARIE (2): Hanged?
MONIQUE: No, hanging–suspended.
MARIE (2): Oh.
MONIQUE: Like something etherial, immaterial, so light you’d think she didn’t have feet at all, like an angel.
MARIE (2): Angels don’t have feet?
MONIQUE: I don’t know. I don’t think so…
========================================================--(WORKING DRAFT) from MAI AT THE PREDATORS’ BALL (© 2011) 
By Marie-Claire Blais. 
Translated by Nigel Spencer.

What Dieudonné perhaps said to Petites Cendres was this: love, my friend, love, before every last bell has tolled for you, but perhaps after all he said nothing, discreet Haitian friend and doctor that he was, and what else could he have said that Petites Cendres hadn’t already understood: bells ringing themselves out for the fast and shameless life he led, bells heralding the ecstasy of love that was sure to come his way, not those deathly bells whose tones fell leaden through the air–jubilant ones rejoicing in the pleasures of this earth; Petites Cendres would always be sated and content now that Yinn, the new owner of the Porte du Baiser Saloon had come on the scene, and Petites Cendres found himself cradled in the respect and protection Yinn and his husband Jason afforded him, never to be humiliated, rejected or abased again, a sacrosanct patronage that stood watch over Petites Cendres–Yinn, girl and boy, goddess of shining days, the completeness of night that crept up on Petites Cendres, Prince of Asia on those fiery nights when he took Yinn in his arms, or was that just vain dreaming too, standing in for all the nights spent waiting for Yinn in the green pool of the sauna, Temple of Obscure Divinities, a calming, breathless dream that would not allow a cell in his body to sleep; surely you must fight, said Dieudonné, and which demon must I take on first, asked Petites-Cendres; indolence, replied Dieudonné with a hint of evasiveness, aware he was already neglecting Petites Cendres for the other patients in his infirmary, not a second to lose my friend, he said, and if I were you, I’d stop everything, really, the hash, the cocaine, and I’d stop it tonight… Yinn was working his way through the lines asking if anyone had seen Fatalité today or yesterday, Fatalité the greatest, all long and lean, nope, haven’t seen him these past two nights, that’s way too long said Yinn, I haven’t seen him for two nights either since he went out roaming the sidewalks advertising the show, his ribs showing under every street lamp as though he’d melted into the folds of his robe…two nights, Yann said, way too long, and he doesn’t live far from here, maybe one of you could go and see, when I saw him he was headed that way over to the second-floor veranda, his skinny legs going slowly up the steps, come on, somebody say you will, said Yinn; I told him I didn’t want to. Hell no, why me, Fatalité no way, un-unh, can’t do it, then Yinn said Jason should go, two nights, nope, way too long, we’re brothers, aren’t we, yes we are, I told Yinn, the ineffable look of those slant blue eyes asking if I’d seen Fatalité, where and in what shape, so where then, nothing like this weirdness has hit the Saloon for so long I don’t really want to know, still I could see him walking and walking, and where to with that strange gait and his crown of pink feathers reaching as always from strands of brown hair high into the night sky, Jason, that’s who I’ll send Yinn said to Petites Cendres, all wrapped up in himself, inside that emaciated body inside a black curtain, fan of plumes waving from his head, thought Petites Cendres; what Dieudonné perhaps said to Petites Cendres was this: love, my friend, love, before every last bell has tolled for you, and asked him if he’d ever seen his friend Timo again, no never saw him, not ever, see, my dear friend Dieudonné, as the Reverend Ezéchielle likes to say, impenetrable are the ways of the Lord, undecipherable too, but his ghost drifts through my mind all the time, starting at the Saloon and going all the way to his door, up the steps to the veranda with a measured pace, one at a time, and there’s Fatalité’s apartment shining in the raw light, always lit day and night, his perch from time to time, you might say, Yinn had designed Fatalité’s outfit, same as everyone else’s, a flamboyant display each evening, strong legs under velvet garters, and Yinn caressed their round butts, here a split skirt, there a hint of a breeze in their backs, saying it’s cool, but step outside to the waiting limo so you can parade all over town, flamboyant display in swishing lingerie, incredible outfits brushing skin the better to reveal–Yinn’s creations—sitting on the raised limo recalling Fatalité upright in the limo like a gigantic flower waving to passers-by, lobbing necklaces perhaps a little too indifferently, the hand waving in isolation…no smile, disappeared into his hollow cheeks, Yinn and Jason married at last, I could make Yinn my wife and no one would know, thought Petites-Cendres, steal a ring and why not two husbands, that’s not overdoing it I’d tell him, no more hashish and no more cocaine if I were you Petites-Cendres, said Dieudonné…
========================================================-(WORKING DRAFT) from NAPOLEON'S EXILE IN AMERICA (© 2011) 
By Ginette Major
Translated by Nigel Spencer.

Getting up late in the morning, he immediately sends for the Count to give him his English lesson, but his heart is not in it as he greets Las Cases sitting slumped in an armchair in his bathrobe with a cloth wrapped around his head.
“Be seated,” he says in a faint voice. 
The Count does so and looks at him. It's been a stormy night indeed!
“In America,” Napoleon goes on, “I'm thinking of calling myself 'Colonel Muiron,' I want only to be an ordinary citizen.” Without waiting for reply, he goes on confidentially, “I am not born to this. Money and glory do not make one happy. I'd have been just as well off as Monsieur Bonaparte as I would being Emperor Napoleon.” He stops, lost in thought.
“It's all one, workers being as happy as anyone else. I've never really appreciated good food and drink, because I've always had plenty. But the average man who isn't used to so much is perfectly contented when he gets a nice stew.”
“Nature makes you what you are, and you could never have been just plain 'Monsieur Bonaparte'.”
“I could be happy with one louis a day and a horse! It's merely a matter of restraining one's desires, and one can get used to that,” he tails off again and then resumes: “I should like to set up somewhere between New York and Philadelphia...a house in the country in the middle of a field, and take long rides on horseback, grow a vegetable garden, watch the animals born and growing.”
“You will be happy there, Sire, in a new life you have never known before.”
Napoleon remains silent, absently leafing through the travel account he had been reading when the Count enters.
“I should also like to travel,” he adds, “three or four coaches, no more, and some friends—just short trips with frequent stops to visit and chat with farmers...with you to interpret for me, of course!”
The Count smiles: “And naturally you will need to write your memoirs.”
“Oh, I don't like writing. You write and I'll dictate.”
“Ah yes, there is so much to say,” the Count assures him, “We'd be busy for years.”
“I don't want to spend the rest of my life remembering.”
“They say Americans are not interested in the past. Only the future matters for them. That's what they look to, and you will have every opportunity to do likewise.”
“On Elba, with money, I would have welcomed all the artists and scientists of Europe and lived surrounded by them at the centre of it all. I would have been happy.” With that, the Count knows there will be no English lesson today.
The navigation table shows the Pike crossing 36º longitude that night—halfway to their destination. That morning, the commander proposes some fishing and hands around fishing-rods and some tips on what to do, whereupon all cast their lines and wait, but the fish are not biting, and the children grow impatient. In a moment of distraction, General Savary, in conversation with General Lallemand, drops his rod into the sea after a brisk nip jerks it out of his hands. Whereas Mme Bertrand holds firmly onto hers and brings in a ten-centimetre catch! The commander suggests she leave it on the hook as bait for something larger. Things are calm and uneventful once more, when the strong voice of Napoleon exclaims, “A bite!” and the rod bends under the weight of his catch. He takes hold of the line and hauls a large codfish to the surface. When it is safely on board, the others put down their tackle and come over to admire it. A sailor carries it off to the kitchen: today's dinner will be fresh.
Meanwhile, a storm is on the way, and the sea turns troubled and grey. The wind raises mountainous waves which carry the boat gently upward, and the rain falls harsh and cold. The boat wavers from side-to-side, and Beaudin suggests the passengers all take to their cabins until it quiets down. All, including Napoleon, are seasick. Then with dawn comes the calm.
The watch signals a sail, which turns out to belong to a British war vessel bearing straight down on them. What they most fear is about to happen. They are still lying down when it occurs, so tired are they from the night's torment. The commander is awakened by the helmsman, whom he orders to stand to and wait for boarding. There is no point in trying to get away. Beaudin quickly checks on the hiding-place he installed before leaving Royan, a small opening cut in the side whose door blends in perfectly with the wall of the ship: a sofa, coffee-table and a pile of French and American newspapers. Normally, it would be used for runaway English sailors, but these will now be lodged in the hold. The commander wakes Ali, sleeping as always on a mattress athwart his master's door. He in turn awakes the Emperor. At Royan, Napoleon said he would never hide in such a place. It is not worthy of him, but he thanks the commander and says when the time comes he will know what to do. There is no changing his mind. Still seasick, he simply stays in bed. Ali informs the commander of his decision.
The latter, always a stoic man, now becomes nervous as the British vessel approaches. Could it be that this time the search will be more methodical, including all the passengers and the cabins? Beaudin went over the crew's papers once more. Everything is in order. Napoleon's cabin is locked and clearly identified as the commander's. 
Who will dare trespass? Well, his guest will not be constrained.
The English frigate pulls in beside the brig, and some sailors install a gangplank for two British officers to board the Pike. Napoleon watches from his cabin. The “red liquid” Dr. Corvisart gave him at Malmaison is never far, just in case. Beaudin holds out the documents without waiting to be asked, and refreshments are provided to lighten the mood. The two officers glance cursorily at the documents and ask no questions about the passengers. What is it they want then? Finally they broach what is really on their minds, and one of them, speaking excellent French, asks: “Are you aware that Napoleon is on his way to America? That is the rumour.”
========================================================from “The Abandoned Piano”  by Annouchka Gravel Galouchko 

Translated by Nigel Spencer (©2011)  

The country is hard-struck by civil war. Two armies, both Russian, stand face-to-face on common ancestral lands: the Whites, representing centuries of imperial rule; and the Reds, determined to change society by any means possible.Nicolaï is twenty years old, and like many sons of the nobility, he is forced to join the White Army at the front. In despair, the young couple marries on the eve of his departure. Holding one another tenderly, Nicolaï and Larissa exchange medallions with their photographs inside. He promises her he will not die:

“Whatever happens, we'll see each other again!” he says, “Our love is written in the heavens.”

The young man and his horse then set off across the immense and deceptive loneliness of the steppe toward his battalion in the south. More than once, death lies in wait for him hidden in the grasses, and when the great Red train that tore the steppe in two empties its machine-gun at him, Nicolaï holds fast to his promise.

The Red Army piles victory upon victory from this point, and the future looks more and more menacing for Larissa's family. From Moscow, terrifying rumours of arrests, pillaging and massacres reach the small provincial town where she is studying, and her own father risks being detained as an enemy of the people at any moment. 

Finally, after many months, Larissa receives news of Nicolaï. His battalion has been forced to evacuate aboard a battleship, never to return to Russia again. France welcomes him as an exile, but the young couple risk never being reunited. Nicolaï anxiously sends her letter after letter.

That year, the winter is especially harsh, and the cruel wind bring terrible snowstorms that completely cover up the windows. The glacial cold creeps in through every tiny crevice, and the country is further devastated by epidemics and famine. People burn their inner walls and partitions, as well as their furniture, so as not to die of cold.

Soon, not a tree is left standing in Mandrova. 

Finally, with no fuel left, Larissa's father has to do as the peasants and take down the very walls of the house for planks to burn. Exhausted, desperate and undernourished, his heart finally fails him.

Thus Larissa is now without either her father or Nicolaï.

In order not to fall prey to depression, she plays the piano from morning to night and dreams of Nicolaï.
========================================================
BIBLIOGRAPHY:"Ghost of a Voice" (Play) in Canadian Theatre Review #79/80, Fall 1994
(20th anniversary issue)--Author Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher: U. of T. Press. ISSN 0315-0836

"Exile" (Play) in Rampike, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1997
Author Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher: Karl E. Jirgens. ISSN 0711-7646

"After-Images" (Poems) in Rampike, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1998
Author Nigel Spencer
Publisher: Karl E. Jirgens. ISSN 0711-7647Wintersleep (Plays)
Author Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher Ronsdale Press. ISBN 0-921870-60-4
Price:              Publication date 1998           Distributor The Exile and the Sacred Travellers (Stories)
Author Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher Ronsdale Press. ISBN 0-921870-79-5
Price:               Publication date 2000          Distributor 

"The Translator: Mediator or Creator?" in Journal of Indo-Canadian Studies, 
Vol. 1, No. 1, 2001
Author Nigel Spencer
Publisher: Centre for Canadian Studies: Union Christian College. ISSN 0972-3307Thunder and Light by Marie-Claire Blais (Novel)--Translator Nigel Spencer----winner of the 2002 GGLA: translation.
Publisher House of Anansi ISBN 0-88784-176-7
Price $24.95 cdn. Publication date 2001.  Distributor Raincoast Books.Ellipse #75, Fall / autumn 2005 (Poems)
Author Pauline Michel--Translator Nigel Spencer
ISSN 0046-1830Frissons d'enfants / Haunted Childhoods (Stories)
Author Pauline Michel--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher XYZ ISBN 2-89261-460-0     1-894852-21-4
Price         Publication date 2006Funambule / Tightrope (Poems)
Author Pauline Michel--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher Broken Jaw Press     ISBN 13: 978-1-55391-044-2     10-1-55391-044-3
Price $16.00 cdn / $14.50 us      Publication date 2006      Distributor Augustino and the Choir of Destruction (Novel) by Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer--winner of the 2007 GGLA: translation.
Publisher House of Anansi. ISBN 0887847528       978-0887847523
Price $24.95 cdn      Publication date 2007      Distributor HarperCollins Canada Ltd.

FROM RU BY KIM THUY IN WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS (CHICAGO) MAY, 2009. 
ENGLISH TRANSLATION--NIGEL SPENCER (© 2009).
HTTP://WORDSWITHOUTBORDERS.ORG/ARTICLE/FROM-RU/#IXZZ1TURGLMUD

Rebecca, Born in the 

Maelstrom (novel)

Author Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer(LONG-LISTED FOR THE DUBLIN IMPAC AWARD, 2011.)
Publisher House of Anansi. ISBN 978-088784-825-4.  Price $24.95 cdn
Publication date 2009.       Distributor HarperCollins Canada Ltd.

"2010 Margaret Lawrence Lecture" by Marie-Claire Blais
Translated by Nigel Spencer in A Writer's Life
Publisher McClelland & Stewart. ISBN 978-0-7710-8928-2 
Price $24.99 cdn/$22.99 usd. 
Publication date 2010.          Distributor. Evolution: The View From the Cottage (non-fiction book)
Author Jean-Pierre Rogel--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher Ronsdale Press. ISBN 978-1-55380-104-7
Price $21.95 cdn.        Publication date 2010.          Distributor.  Feet of the Angels (play)
Author Evelyne de la Chenelière--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher Playwrights Canada. Publication date 2012UNPUBLISHED:

Collected Plays of Marie-Claire Blais-Vol.1: Radio Plays
Author Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher Talonbooks. ISBN       Price        Publication date**2012
Distributor Collected Plays of Marie-Claire Blais-Vol.2: Stage and Television Plays
Author Marie-Claire Blais--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher Talonbooks,      ISBN           Price 
Publication date**2012         Distributor Savage Eye
Author Pauline Michel--Translator Nigel Spencer
Publisher      , ISBN           Price           Publication date**           Distributor FILMOGRAPHY-films subtitled:The Other Side of Mount Royal–1991A Season in the Life of Emmanuel–2005Marie-Claire Blais: Illuminations–2006Raoul Wallenberg: The Angel of Budapest–2006Bazart! (Bravo! Channel series)–2007…and other documentary films.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++                       
                        All translations copyright © as dated. For further information contact:
                                                 nigelGspencer@hotmail.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++PROFILES: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Spencer
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/nigelspencerPlease note: no Twitter, no Facebook.