101 Letters to a Prime Minister (37 page)

I hope you will find this a stimulating addition to what must by now be a pretty fascinating, and eclectic, library.

Yours sincerely,

Don McKay

J
OHN
S
TEFFLER
(b. 1947) grew up in Ontario and now lives in Newfoundland. After working a variety of jobs, including carpenter, deckhand and shoemaker, he became an English professor. His books of poetry include
That Night We Were Ravenous
and
The Grey Islands
. His novel,
The Afterlife of George Cartwright
, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Steffler was Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008.

D
ON
M
C
K
AY
(b. 1942) is a Canadian poet, professor and editor. His books of poetry, which frequently address ecology, include the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning
Night Field
and
Another
Gravity
, and the Griffin Prize–winning
Strike/Slip
. McKay is a co-founder of Brick Books, a Member of the Order of Canada and a birdwatcher.

Dear Mr. Harper,

It is with strong feelings that I send you today
Caligula
, by Albert Camus.

You will note that I am enclosing two versions: one, the original, in French, of course, but also an English version, in a skilful translation by Stuart Gilbert.

I think—mistakenly, perhaps, and please correct me if I am wrong—that if you are not yet familiar with this author, the opportunity of comparing form and content from one language to another can only prove to be enlightening.

There are many reasons for my having chosen this work.

Here are two of them.

The year 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death
of Albert Camus, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

I usually refrain from categorizing authors as being either “major” or “minor”: I have always thought that literature is a treasure in which each contribution is essential, and the older I grow the clearer this becomes to me. There is a style or none, a voice or none. If there is a voice, there is literature. If not, it isn’t literature.

However, Camus—among very few others—is clearly an exception. He not only talked, he dove in, canvassing the woven link between the soul of humanity and its rebellion. From this immersion, he brought back exceptional works, notably
The Rebel
, a deeply moving and passionate essay on the genesis and history of this rebellion, and
Caligula
, of course, the play which is the transposition of this
Rebel
. Not just a simple sketch, nor a dialogued representation, but more: an incarnation.

If, for example, one compared
The Rebel
with the plans of a mechanical device as drawn by engineers,
Caligula
would constitute the locomotive itself, charging ahead, never veering from its course, crushing everything in its path.

The second reason behind my choice relates to the fact that while the character of Emperor Caligula may have seemed to Camus to be an excellent illustration of the myth seething through the events of his time—just before World War II—it is certainly plausible to claim that in our time this myth acts overtly and has become … omnipresent. It has even succeeded, in the Western public sphere, at least, in repressing anything that might tend to contradict it. Revenge against life and its corollary, the cult of pure blind power, are to be seen everywhere today. Signs of their reign assault our eyes wherever we look.

Albert Camus has left us an extraordinarily inspiring body of work that can undoubtedly help us to better define who we
are, what drives us, and to better understand our fellow man as well as our era.

At the heart of this work is
Caligula
.

Albert Camus achieved with Caligula what Sigmund Freud, in his own times, did through Oedipus: from an ancient story, he brought forward an essential myth for all people of all eras. And he gave it a name.

The storyline? Very simple.

Caligula, the emperor of Rome, beloved by all, has just lost Drusilla, his sister who was also his lover. He becomes a monster. Why? Because this loss makes him see that, simply put, “Men die; and they are not happy.”

Drusilla’s death has awakened in him a yearning for the impossible. In his quest, he will be ruthless.

My wish for you, Mr. Prime Minister, is that reading this appalling yet magnificent play will provide you with as luminous a source of inspiration as it did for me.

Respectfully,

René-Daniel Dubois, O.C.

A
LBERT
C
AMUS
(1913–1960) was an author, journalist, essayist, playwright and one of the essential philosophers of the twentieth century, primarily for his work on the theory of the Absurd. He was born in French Algeria, and participated in the French Resistance during World War II. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

R
ENÉ
-D
ANIEL
D
UBOIS
(b. 1955) is a Quebec playwright, actor and director. His plays include the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning
Ne blâmez jamais les bédouins
and
Being at Home with Claude
, which was made into a film.

Dear Mr. Harper,

In a democracy, it is a cherished privilege of the citizen to address directly the leader of his or her country. We all know in our hearts that it is the duty of the leader to respond to these efforts. Matters of interest or concern may need to be addressed this way, and adequate responses often ensure an element of serenity to the citizen who has initiated the dialogue, as well as provide the leader with clues about the soul and the mind of his or her fellow citizens.

When Yann asked me to join in on the What Is Stephen Harper Reading? book club, I was positively elated because it gave me a role, as a poet and as a translator, in this campaign, which, you will have learned, has been noted and admired in many a country and matches a cherished belief I have in international cultural relations, a foreign policy your government absurdly dropped, which was not only a great loss to Canadian
artists and creators, but also a blow to Canada’s image abroad.

The novel I’m sending you today was published in French in Montreal in 2007 and received the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation to English in 2009; so you have two books here resulting from the special and exceptional talents of two artists: a novelist and a translator.

The book,
Nikolski
, by Nicolas Dickner, was very well received both in Quebec and in France; it won many prizes, and has been beautifully translated by Lazer Lederhendler.

The profession of translator is a discreet and humble one. We translators are seldom noticed and hardly anybody ever believes that we did our work right. There is always a nuance, always the shadow of an emotion that we missed, or there is a smell or a taste that we have exaggerated or understated. Whatever we do, we know that another translator in a few years will do differently, may even do better, just as a reader or a writer who understands both languages is likely to say that the original is much, much better than the translation. Of course it’s better! Most of the time.

But the translator can sometimes take some sort of a revenge. There is an anecdote I like to tell: Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet
near the end of the sixteenth century. About one hundred years later, Voltaire was born in France. Two pillars of European and world culture. Naturally, Voltaire knew of Shakespeare and read his works. One day he wanted to share with his readers, in French, the most famous line uttered by Hamlet:

How would these ten words be translated in a way that respected not only the desperate intensity of the original English, but adopted the common form of French verse in use at the time, the twelve-syllable rhyming “alexandrins”? This way:

An interesting exercise would be to take Voltaire’s two verses without knowing Shakespeare’s original verse and translate them back to English. Translation can be a magical cave revealing beauties even the author did not know about …

Returning to
Nikolski
, whichever version you read first, the French original or the English translation, your attention will be drawn to the cover illustration: three fish, the same three fish, actually, but swimming in different directions, horizontally in one and vertically in the other. I believe there is a slightly different message there, although I’m not sure what that message is. What do you think?

The novel is a splendid construction of twisted and adventurous lives where various characters hover around each other in a dance of chance and luck, mostly around the Marché Jean-Talon in Montreal, but also in other places in Canada—among them the Prairies and the north shore of the Saint Lawrence—and in distant Caribbean countries. Piracy is important in this book, and navigation. And a fishmonger, and … and … You’ll love that crowd once you get to know Noah and Joyce and the narrator who sells used books on rue Saint-Laurent.

The French version has a dedication from Nicolas Dickner to our granddaughter Catherine, encouraging her to “return to the novel.” She’d told us that she hadn’t read a novel in a while. But she already had a copy of the book. So allow me to encourage you, too, to return to the novel, fulfilling the wish of Nicolas Dickner.

With my best wishes,

Émile Martel

Born in Rivière-du-Loup in 1972, N
ICOLAS
D
ICKNER
grew up in Quebec and studied visual arts and literature in university. Afterwards, he travelled extensively in Europe and Latin America before settling in Montreal. His first novel,
Nikolski
, won three awards in Quebec, one in France, and was the winner of Canada Reads 2010. He currently writes a weekly column for
Voir
, and his most recent book is
Apocalypse for Beginners
.

É
MILE
M
ARTEL
(b. 1941) is a writer and translator. He worked as a diplomat from 1967 to 1999, serving twelve years at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, four of them as the minister for cultural affairs. He has published seventeen books of poetry and fiction, thirty Spanish and thirteen English translations, most of them in cooperation with Nicole Perron-Martel. He was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for
Pour orchestre et poète seul
in 1995. He is the President of the Centre québécois du PEN international.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Books sometimes come to you at serendipitous times. For me, the reading of
How I Live Now
by Meg Rosoff coincided with a time in my life when I was spending several weeks in rural England. The novel is wonderful. It starts with fifteen-year-old Daisy arriving in the UK to stay with her cousins on a farm. Their mother leaves, and then a war begins. Rosoff never tells the causes of the war. Daisy is not interested. She’s too busy falling in love with her cousin, the compelling and startling Edmond. Soon the events of the war separate them and Daisy is transformed.

In the UK this Easter a strange thing happened. The skies closed because of the giant ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano. Planes were prevented from flying. I was in Devon in a cottage on Dartmoor. After a couple of days with no flights, I began to notice how eerily quiet the skies were. I lolled in the flower-filled garden, the moors spread before me, the book dangling from my hand as I stared into the empty blue above. The
extraordinary story of Daisy and her cousins roaming around a rural landscape blighted by rationing and violence had seeped from the pages, staining my imagination. The creepy silence of the skies echoed the cessation of flights in the novel. I couldn’t laze around the garden without feeling the cousins hurtling around behind me on their way to their barn. I couldn’t get up and walk over the moors without seeing Daisy frantically searching for Edmond.

Meg Rosoff published
How I Live Now
in 2004 and gave up her career in advertising shortly after that. It was her first book but since then she has published many more (a thrilling discovery for me as I now have all the rest to read). She regularly updates her blog at
www.megrosoff.co.uk
. She wrote of her most recent novel:

She seems to feel that her book is somehow alive. I wonder if she felt the same way when writing
How I Live Now
. I’m going to hazard a guess that she did. Writers feel that way about their characters and their stories. And when a writer is as talented as Rosoff, the reader feels life pulsing from the pages of her books.