Writing between cultures (1997)

Consistent with her approach to translation as a strained encounter at the borders, Godard discusses two different imperial moments in Canadian culture that produce two oppositional models of translation, colonial and decolonial. The former operates as a vertical, hierarchical “con/version” in the 17th-century writing of Marie de l’Incarnation, the Ursuline nun in New France who wrote dictionaries and catechisms in Indigenous languages. The latter functions as a transversal, resistant “re/version” in the play Almighty Voice and His Wife by Daniel Moses, a contemporary playwright of Delaware descent raised on the Six Nations land in Ontario. Godard’s analysis shows that the passage between languages is always situated in a particular history and is shaped by specific “linguistic and cultural interference.”