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ISBN 978-0-9819557-0-4
10/30/2009
with translator Sheila Fischman at Brooklyn's Community Bookstore
Launch party sponsored by the Québec Government office in New YorkNow available!
A quietly affecting modern fairy tale told with humor and warmth, Translation is a Love Affair is a slender novel of immense humanity. A Quebecois novelist with a bad back and his vivacious young translator, discover a stray cat with an SOS attached to its collar. They embark upon a search for its owner, and when they discover a young girl with bandaged wrists they are drawn into a mystery they don't dare neglect. The world Poulin creates is haunted by dark memories, isolation, and tragedy, yet it is a world in which language - and love - are the most immediate and vital forces, where one human being hearing a cry of distress of another is compelled to shed one's own inhibitions to respond.
Launch Party in Brooklyn, October 30th at 6:30pm
For Jacques Poulin, in this miniature masterpiece of tenderness and humour, translation is more than the passage from language to language, it is the essence of our human condition: giving and taking, teaching and learning, experiencing and sharing experience, a love affair with our fellow human beings.
"—Alberto Manguel
If familiarity and surprise have become the trademark of Poulin’s novels, it is evident that Translation Is a Love Story does not deviate from this model; and Poulin’s reader continues to read it as if he / she would pay a visit to relatives, as much to reoccupy a familiar world as to discover that which is new.
"—Canadian Literature
We fall under the spell of this heartwarming, human novel, penned by Jacques Poulin at the summit of his art.
"—Mieux Vivre
... these sentences that have been stripped, pumiced and polished until only the beauty of the grain remains, the fine drawing of time and patience.... 'Language is the house of being,' says Jack Waterman, alter ego of Jacques Poulin, quoting Heidegger. This house that Jacques Poulin fixes up and decorates, book by book, is a refuge where it is nice to come warm up.
"—Entre les lignes
Translation is a love story? Absolutely, just as that of readers with Jacques Poulin’s novels. This one will not disappoint them.
"—“Trouver le traducteur en nous”
With all the talent of a goldsmith, Jacques Poulin weighs his words with finesse. Each word in this short book of 112 pages carries the weight determined by its author, that of the heart.
"—“Le Poids des mots”
“Jacques Poulin’s writing is always a fortuitous encounter. With each new book, the “little melody” created by Poulin refines the hypersensitivity of his literary project. This new novel that he offers, short and dense, once again shows that the pleasure of storytelling, entirely feline, is for him a poetics of writing itself.” “Here is an irresistible book that fans of Jacques Poulin’s will read with delight, written with heart and passion and carried by suppressed emotion, touching and sincere.”
"—LÉMEAC: Communiqué
[Poulin] shares a mix of detached humour, fantasy, and compassion with Vonnegut and Salinger.
"—Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
One of the finest and most underrated novelists in Québec.
"—The Globe & Mail
One of my favorite writers in the world is Jacques Poulin.
"—Rawi Hage