The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

est tradition of the ballad, always natural,
never forced, due to a command of the
rhythmic potentiality of vivid colloquial
English.
We can feast on Sean Virgo's powerful,
precise prose, and Margaret Avison's
poems, carrying such impact in their simplicity.
Then there is an excerpt from Jane
Urquhart's Changing Heaven, playing with
intertextuality yet moving beyond, and the
haunting Prophecy by film-maker and poet
Pier Paolo Pasolini. But among the most
superb pieces is the breath-taking extract
from Timothy Findley's 1977 novel The
Wars., a stark portrait of war-time in which
the author proceeds like a painter, through
dabs, light brush-strokes, mere touches, to
capture fragments of truth/ insight, bits of
reality like the ancient pictures that crumble
under the narrator's gaze. T. Findley's
minimalist technique is awesome, as he
manages to telescope image and reality, to
achieve perfect stasis, a time freeze in which
the reader literally enters the snapshot.
Not all the pieces are of equal calibre, of
course. There are forgettable pieces like M.
Atwood's Murder in the Dark or Claude
Gavreau's The Good Life. Tibor Déry's The
Circus (Hungary) is laborious and flat, and
Italo Calvino's If On a Winter Night a
Traveller (Italy) is equally unconvincing,
reading like a poor imitation of Alain
Robbe-Grillet. Mainly translation getting in
the way, you might argue. Not so. For
throughout its 20 years of publication, Exile
has systematically offered the Englishspeaking
public samples of the best Quebec
authors, all respecting a tradition of fine
translation. Ray Ellenwood's translation of
Jacques Ferron's Papa Boss is but one example
of translation at its best, that is translation
that does not privilege the referential
system of the target text, and that rather
than erasing or assimilating the foreign
quality of the source text, aims at preserving
the difference or otherness. Another
success is W. Findlay and M. Bowman's
translation of Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-
Soeurs, which convincingly turns
Tremblay's jarring joual into a vivid Scots-
English working-class dialect.
Don't miss this superb compilation of
high quality artistic production: indulge
yourself and feast on it. Taking Houdini as
the embodiment of magic, killed by a gratuitous
act, B. Callaghan and his literary
magazine have tried to be keepers of the
magic: "If you want to know where Harry
Houdini still lives," says Callaghan, "where
he escaped before your eyes, from all the
traps and locks of poetry and prose and
painting and music, Harry Houdini is in
Exile. Houdini is in the heart of every
writer who appears in Exile."
The Author Speaks
Margaret Atwood
"An Interview with Margaret Atwood." American
Audio Prose Library n.p.
"Margaret Atwood reading "Unearthing Suite."
American Audio Prose Library n.p.
"Margaret Atwood reads from A Handmaid's Tale
and talks about this futuristic fable of misogyny as
compared to Orwell's 1984." A Moveable Feast #17
^P-
Reviewed by Nancy Roberts
When the scholars at the Twelfth Symposium
on Gileadean Studies gather to discuss the
tapes that make up The Handmaid's Tale,
their document is about two hundred years
old and its narrator has long since met her
fate. The scholars are not, however, as
interested in the narrator as they are in the
identity of her Commander, whose power
and public position compel their attention.
While the tapes considered here differ from
that archival material in a number of ways,
an interest in identity and power remains.
At the end of the twentieth century it is the
public identity of the author and the
sources of her power that fascinate us.
The voice on these tapes is that of