I Is Another.

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Daniel Sloate (1991 winner of the Félix-Antoine Savard Award and 1998 Governor General’s Award nominee for poetry translation) was, in his own right, a poet and playwright. Not surprisingly, the translator of the Guernica edition of Illuminations uses a Rimbaud line as the collective title for these one-act plays. Adolescent rebellion and odoriferous taboos mark these 14 surrealistic pieces. At times quite lyrical (e.g. in the middle of Castle Midget, where size matters and the semi-archaic phrasing suggests an animated children’s tale), in Mommy Game he calls up the Grimm brothers’ savage cautionary fables, and in others he uses normally disgusting elements to suggest a theatrical allegory. In Still Life in Z Flat he turns out a virtual Bald Soprano for a new age. The characters here and in all of the pieces bear highly evocative names and often embrace remarkable metamorphoses. In a note on the cover, Sloate states that his scripts were “started in France in the 1960s and finishing touches were added a decade later.” Some shaping of the experimental dialogue was done in rehearsal with small casts of actors in France or Toronto. Another note that the plays were written with small budgets in mind would seem to be belied by rather elaborate—not to say demanding—stage directions. The highly descriptive style, however, would probably inspire a certain type of Fringe production where simple means are used to suggest the most distorted surrealistic journeys and the target audience is predisposed to suspend disbelief, social alarm, and good taste in order to board a psychological roller coaster. Although delightful to read (aloud), the initial plays have a very similar pseudo-archaic fairy-tale narrative voice and style. The language loosens up somewhat in other selections, but without any production dates given, it is impossible to tell if this is a result of maturity or simply a difference in perspective. I Is Another is a collection where the author’s voice is distinctive and where one can appreciate flashes of gold in the writing. Whether the plays would translate easily or consistently from the armchair to the stage is another question.