ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study of Nancy Huston’s use of translation through a close-reading of Trois fois septembre and Limbes/Limbo. Trois fois septembre reads translation as an incomplete act of communication. The book’s illustration of white, European privilege is punctuated by memories of the Holocaust and the Vietnam war. The gradual melding of the two main characters’ languages of expression (French and English) into a liminal space of incomprehensibility forcefully questions power differentials across lines of historical narrative and race. The author’s practice of forcing both hegemonic languages into palimspestual self-effacing equally dominates Limbes/Limbo, a dual-language text, written in English and French, the two languages mirroring each other on facing pages. This chapter argues that Limbes/Limbo creates a palimpsestual structure within which two hegemonic languages minorize each other creating new meanings with clear politically dissident potential. Ultimately, the estuarine environment in Huston’s work is one that privileges an in-depth interrogation qua subversion of global languages’ power to convey meaning in their capacity as guarantors and proliferators of Eurocentric and logocentric understandings of Reason.
