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Gallery Jean-Louis Roux: Le Drame du Roi Lear and "Translating Shakespeare into French: Enjoyment and Torture"
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| Jean-Louis Roux |
In this section CASP presents two clips from the influential Québécois theatrical figure Jean-Louis Roux: the first a clip from Roux's adaptation of King Lear, Le Drame du Roi Lear and the second a clip from a speech Roux gave on translating Shakespeare into French.
From 1998 to October 31, 2003, Roux was the Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts.The Canada Council for the Arts or Canada Council, was founded by Canadian Parliament in 1957. As a Crown corporation that funds Canadian artists and encourages the production of art in Canada, the Canada Council is an arms-length government corporation supervised by the Department of Heritage. Its key function is alloting grants to Canadian artists based on the merits of their peer-reviewed applications. The council also judges many of Canada's top arts awards, including the Governor General's Awards. The council has six main divisions, each of these coordinates grant-giving to different areas, including: visual arts, media arts, dance, music, theatre, and writing. These areas are complemented by three groups that work with all the sections: aboriginal art (the purpose of which is to foster First Nations art in all media, equity officer, to encouraged diversity in arts funding, Inter-Arts, to deal with proposals that combine or transcend traditional artistic disciplines. The Council administers the Killam Program of scholarly awards, the Governor General's Literary Awards and the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. The Canadian Commission for UNESCO, the Art Bank, and the Public Lending Right Commission operate under its aegis. Each year the council receives some 16,000 grant requests that are are judged by panels of artists set up by each division of the council. The council gives grants to about 6000 artists each year. The total budget for the council is approximately 130 million dollars (2003).
In addition to being a former Senator and Lieutenant Governor of Quebec,Roux
was a major theatrical force in Québec appearing in the wildly successful
television series La Famille Plouffe/The Plouffe Family co-produced
by CBC and Radio-Canada televisions and being one of the founding members/directors
of the Théâtre du Nouveau
Monde in 1951.
CASP is pleased to also be able to present a clip from a lecture Roux
gave, "Translating Shakespeare into French: Enjoyment and Torture,"
in which he discusses at length the adaptation/translation
of Shakespeare into French in Québec. Roux presented this
lecture as part of McGill University's Shakespeare Lecture series on
March 24, 1998. Roux discusses his "love affair" with the
bard and chronicles his long career studying, performing, and translating
Shakespeare. Addressing a meeting of The Friends of McGill University
Library, Roux is dramatic, passionate, and humorous. Moreover, his devotion
to Shakespeare's language is evident, and Roux's revered standing in
Canada finds just cause herein.
Roux's notions of translation are aligned with the emergence of Québécois
nationalism, which entailed the use of the French languageto naturalize
non-Québécois influences like Shakespeare: the first Québec
translation of a Shalespeare play occured, perhaps surprisingly, only
in 1968. Roux's comments on Shakespearean translation reflect on both
the economic considerations and the specific geo-political position
of Québec as a French-speaking province in Canada in which educated
native French speakers cannot help but have extensive contact with English
speaking culture:
"The first reason why I decided to translate Twelfth Night myself is merely that I wasn't happy with the existing translations. Not one of them made me perfectly happy. Secondly, if you consider the business angle of our craft, I cannot understand why we should pay French people to make our own translations in French, particularly since all (or practically all) of them know less about English than we do."
Audio Clip: From Le Drame du Roi Lear
Audio Clip:"Translating Shakespeare into French: Enjoyment and Torture"
