In a Minor Key

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

In a Minor Key is David Lobdell’s translation of L’obsédante
obиse, which in 1987 won the Governor General’s Literary Award for
French-language fiction. In this unusual book, Quebec writer Gilles
Archambault turns from novel-length fiction to a form so compressed, so
minimal, that he gives us two complete fictions per page. Much briefer
than even short-short stories, these pieces reveal a pivotal moment in
life, a glimpse of that life’s essense, in a language more poetry than
prose.

Whether Archambault speaks in a voice young or old, male or female, his
worldview is classical: youth, sensual and joyful, passes swiftly by,
leaving us looking back. With heavy irony he portrays in fiction after
fiction this motif of ubi sunt: youth has fled, and with it love, but
desire remains. “I keep nothing, I throw everything out,” says one
speaker, “in the mistaken belief that it will always be possible to
begin anew. Yet when a new beginning appears, the old has made it
inaccessible: “There he is, following 30 years of loyal service,
completing the retirement forms with an exemplary attention to detail.
He is decidedly less youthful than at the time of joining the Company;
the furrows on his brow are more numerous today, his shoulders are more
rounded, and he no longer sees very clearly. At last, the freedom he so
often dreamed of in his youth! But why is it that, on the threshold of
bliss, he finds himself trembling?”

The translator of minimalist writing is under a particular obligation
to render words and phrases naturally. David Lobdell’s version is a
bit stiff and literal, relying too easily on cognates rather than
recasting into new and idiomatic English. That the power still comes
through is a tribute to the original.