ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role that translation and translators played in the appropriation of the American counterculture movement in Quebec, specifically in the context of the periodical Mainmise. Published in Montreal between 1970 and 1978, Mainmise was the most important magazine associated with the emerging counterculture movement in Quebec. It was also a product of translation. With access to images and texts drawn from over 200 publications, its editors and contributors translated some of the American movement's key writings and music, adapted the psychedelic graphic styles of its comics and periodicals and provided a hub for an alternative social network. Through various forms of interlingual and cultural transfer, translation contributed to building a repertoire of cultural references for a new, alternative imagined community. As a vehicle of cultural transfer, translation provided a bridge for transnational and transcultural exchange while also—paradoxically perhaps—serving to reaffirm a distinct Francophone Québécois cultural memory and identity within a predominantly Anglophone Canadian context.
