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Intimate Journal by Nicole Brossard
Translated and with an introduction by Barbara Godard
The Mercury Press, 2004
Reviewed by Jane Ledwell
When last I read Nicole Brossard’s complex and worthwhile writing, I was
studying her poems at university. There, I was still close enough to French
immersion to read her words without the intermediary of a translator.
It was a revelation to rediscover her work in English, in her Intimate Journal,
translated and with an introduction by Barbara Godard. The book, in two parts,
encompasses “Intimate Journal or Here’s a Manuscript,” autobiographical writing
originally created for presentation on radio, the banality of everyday
transformed by aurality; and “Works of Flesh and Metonymies,” the density of
human relations refracted in the structures of language and transformed, as the
title suggests, by flight from the literal.
While I myself have “journalled” experiences and emotions, I have never kept a
journal. It is the “keeping” that always caused me trouble. For me, a clear
sense of my audience and purpose was too integral to writing, even personal
chronicles of the events my life. I was insufficient to myself as an audience,
and “posterity” was too abstract. This is one question Brossard addresses
directly and publicly in the first section of Intimate Journal, to intriguing effect.
In the section entitled “Intimate Journal or Here’s a Manuscript,” the
autobiographical detail is appealing to the extent that it is transformed on the
page, language refiguring the author as she refigures the language. The work is
both intuitive and intellectual. Brossard is an extraordinary feminist writer:
impelled always by the interrelation of the personal and political. Writing
work, for women, is snatched in moments; these moments, though, contain and
create magic. It is by illuminating the very dullness, the everydayness of the
quotidian, Brossard illuminates a woman’s writing life, what receives attention
in the process of ordinary selection; the author resuscitates what is continuous
among fragments: “As one assembles reality from pieces.”
Forthright in her politics, Brossard (particularly in translation) again and
again risks didacticism and rises instead to poetry. She counters one woman’s
reluctance to identify as a radical feminist by saying “it would deprive her of
nothing except the superfluous, the superficial, and the official.” The
perfection of phrasing lifts the polemic, permits delight. Elsewhere, Brossard
brilliantly teases out the radical nature of women’s partnerships: “As though
couples of women were couples of artists. As though creation were an inevitable
staging of this cast of mind in which a woman projects her entire being onto
another woman the best of herself who, like an auspicious intelligence in the
imaginary, gives her the energy to conceive.” How gorgeously Brossard’s hammer
of insistence fractures into meaning.
“Works of Flesh and Metonymies,” submits creative language to the labours of the bodies of women, the stresses of the generative mode in intergenerational relationship of mothers, daughters, lovers, sisters. This section resonates profoundly in the belly for me as a new mother. The unreasonable demands of love and challenge among women, the slipperiness of identity, the passionate expression of one’s language (in French, literally, one’s tongue) -- Brossard engages these fearlessly.
While I did not feel a distinct sense of necessity in the joining of “Here’s a Manuscript” and “Works of Flesh and Metonymies” to create this two-parted book, they still function as illuminating parallels, and I found myself satisfied by their contrasts.
Yoking these two disparate texts and having them translated both have the
practical function of bringing this writing to a wider audience, and Brossard’s
insight is well worth these practical efforts. A writer so preoccupied with
language is particularly ripe for translation. Brossard herself reflects that “To be translated is to be interrogated not only in what one believes oneself to
be but in one’s way of thinking in a language, and of being thought by the same language.”
Barbara Godard’s task, as translator, is intimate in this Journal, and she
applies both intellectual rigour and linguistic delicacy. The translation is
excellent. The introduction by Godard is at its best, too, when it traces the
efflorescent possibilities in both language of origin and language of
translation, recognizing also impossibility. She says: “In the contemporary
West, the subject emerges tautological and can have no meaning” and “The journal
is the shady and shadowy space of a text.”
The rest of Godard’s introduction, steeped as it is in all the appropriate
trappings of radical French feminist cultural and literary theory, leaves me
with a disappointment that is unrelated to Godard’s deep, human and scholarly,
appreciation, or to The Mercury Press's courage in publishing books of worth. My disappointment is that the introduction suggests a sequestration of this book
among readers in university classrooms and of its ideas and rich language in the
imaginations of graduate and undergraduate students. This would be a shame.
Brossard, especially in such finely tuned translation, offers much to engage
women inside and outside academic circles. The completeness and complexity of
women’s lives, offered in language: surely this is a challenge readers can
accept even without the imprimatur of university. I am happy to have had the
chance to read Nicole Brossard's stimulating words as a solitary reader, and
have greatly appreciated the opportunity to extend what I know of her writing in
French into my own first language of English.
Did you read Broussard's Intimate Journal? |
