Yellow-Wolf and Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

This volume is the last work of a writer whose literary career began
late in life. Gaspé (1786-1871) did not publish his well-known
historical novel Les Anciens Canadiens until 1863, or his Mémoires
until 1866; Divers, the original French version of Yellow-Wolf and Other
Tales, did not see print until 1893, long after the author’s death.

Thus the anomaly of the present volume: a new translation, the only
version in English, of a work published in the late-nineteenth century
by an author who in spirit and style belonged to the eighteenth. As if
to emphasize these paradoxes, Jane Brierley (who won the 1990 Governor
General’s Literary Award for this translation) has rendered de
Gaspé’s prose into an English of stately sweep and almost archaic
language. To complete the illusion, the designers have produced a book
whose type style, layout, and illustrations so closely reflect other
times that at first glance one believes it is a photographic
reproduction of an early edition.

The volume’s four “tales” are part history and part fiction.
“Yellow-Wolf, Malecite Chieftain of Old,” recounts the heroic life
of a Native who as a centenarian told his story to the young de Gaspé.
De Gaspé relates the story (which includes descriptions of Native
torture) starkly, as if for shock value, yet in some passages he
presents Yellow-Wolf in a more reflective stance, as a philosopher
caught in a change of worlds. “Woman of the Foxes” is similarly
ambiguous; the Native peoples are folklorized and therefore diminished
in some sequences, yet celebrated for their humanity in others. “Big
Louis and the Legend of Indian Lorette” descends to stereotyping of
Indian alcoholism, while powerfully rendering a Native legend. In the
final piece, which is slight and different in genre and subject from the
others, de Gaspé investigates the mystery of who made the famous
sculpture of General Wolfe in Quebec City’s Literary and Historical
Society library.

Yellow-Wolf is an uneven work, the product of a very elderly writer.
Yet it strongly reflects the times in which it was set, a quality that
is only magnified by the design of this careful and handsome edition.