It always starts with a definition. Whether you start by negative inference or Apollonian gazes over the landscape, it starts with a definition. Translation as it is practiced today should be slotted under another rubric – perhaps transliteration – the agronomical spewing out of words from one language or dialect to another. A semantic thresher. But, in the end, not up to the task. Garbage in, garbage out.

Translation is something that sups from a different chalice. It originates with an act of surpassing hubris. based on the belief that you are capable of mind-reading – of knowing the inner thoughts of the original author – be he or she writer, musician, or politician or even judge – and to even know these thoughts in their inchoate form, pre-articulation, while still hovering in the antechamber of the mind.

A translator would never admit to such a thing, but by the time his or her talent is brought to fruition, compromises and abdications will have become the rule in ways that will never be disclosed…unless of course events dictate otherwise. And with the initiation, an omerta, one that governs our tribe, the strength of which is ensured by the shame that accompanies the accession to knowledge. True knowledge.

To translate is to reveal the intent behind the cuneiform you are deciphering and to understand that an idea is written in the stars long before its formal expression.

In the mid-1980s, the blueprint for a new world order was being laid down, or should I say, several blueprints – the NAFTA, the EU Constitution and unknown to the world the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which on its face was a deliberate attempt to hijack the history of a country. But that is another story.

I began as a lawyer, not a translator, but for reasons rooted in my clan atavism and a certain idea of Canada, I moved to Quebec to “save the nation” at a time when Quebec separation threatened. But my idealism imploded from the earliest days inside the cauldron of the Montreal corporate world where I learned that another transnational project was underway and that my firm, DMSD[1], was one of the engine rooms of a transnational project, and part of a nascent conspiracy to undermine our institutions and install a new world order. The following cases are intended to introduce the reader to this sectarian universe, where translators operate alone and at their own peril.

Case I – Manon

During the early days at DMSD, I met Manon, almost a prototype of the translators caught up in the killing fields of human translation during the 1980s. She was exquisitely refined, as fragile as an orchid, and her suffering made her almost ephemeral. A translator of securities prospectuses, work which is like being buried alive, and transformed into a sarcophagus, powdered corpse and all – and yet remaining perversely attached to her plight and by sculpting perfect works of art and conferring nobility upon each document destined for the Montreal Stock Exchange. At the same time – and this explains the hold she had on me – she was steadily but surely shrinking and becoming more evanescent. I was certain that she had been 5’9”, gangly, when I had first arrived. And in those last weeks, she had diminished to 5’5”. I was sure of this, or should I say, the condition to which I was succumbing was sure of it.

During the Autumn evenings in Quebec, la belle province is the loveliest region of the world – balsam, birch and maples rain kaleidoscopic colours across the province. But, like Manon, I was beginning to avoid direct sunlight. I was fettered to the arid corridors of DSMD as it was known, fiddling, playing sudoku, positing Manon’s height on a graph, and how to make comparatives with earlier weeks and months. I had stopped as an effective billable hour churner, but my time sheets had turned into music sheets, of what I imagined would appear in music if the madness I witnessed were transformed into music. From the ephemeral mist of that void, I decided that I had to measure Manon’s height prior to her disappearance, which I was sure would come.

Case II - Zigby

A second person convinced me I had to leave this sterile environment before I too succumbed. Zigby. Zigby was a silver-haired securities solicitor, always impeccable, chic, soft-spoken, a man in his seventh decade on the planet, who seemed to rule like an ancient tsar from the depths of his office. But for a period of several months, he began suddenly to gravitate towards the secretary pool in the middle of floor 57, cranking out prospectuses, in essence doing all the work you would expect reserved for articled students. I watched him one evening, midnight approaching, seemingly lost, well into the sunset of his life, and a terrible epiphany descended upon me, and I knew that I would not suffer a similar fate.

For several weeks, I fell into a disabused lull, blandly colouring in my timesheets without doing any real work and falling into an irreversible passivity. Then one day, I walked out, without so much as mentioning a word. And nobody even noticed for ten days. I spent my days shooting pool in the Bobar, the Café Central and the Inspecteur Epingle, mulling over things, until an unexpected opportunity arose out of nowhere.

***

Case III - Daouda

Daouda Djiang, QC, DG of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, headquartered in Arusha Tanzania, had heard about my unusual ability to translate tomes in record time. Daouda was a prince of a man, presiding over the macabre archives of that human, crypto-genetic catastrophe that occurred in April 1994 across the Rwandan nation – 800 000 Tutsis hacked to death and tossed casually into septic ditches over a period of four months. Daouda had found me through the association of lawyer translators in Montreal.

Daouda explained that nobody had been able to take on the job due to the pressures and the devastating subject matter of the charges.

“What does it involve?” I asked during our first telephone conversation.

“Defence briefs. Each of them over 300 pages. The lingua franca of the judges is English. But the ruling junta is francophone, so their lawyers are Parisian.”

“I can only do one at a time. Technically, I don’t foresee any major issues. How long is the turnaround time?"

“8 days.”

At this time – the late eighties - Montreal was divided into clearly demarcated ethnic zones – which also melted into a fused organic, amoebic mass, on a north/south spine of a street known as the Main.

I began each evening twenty blocks to the east of the Main, in a bar called l’Inspecteur Epingle, a bistro where the clientele was swivel-eyed, mad, shamelessly alcoholic and hell-bent to pursue that Jabberwockian experiment to its logical end. From there, I footed it back to the Main, the Café Central, and down to the Bobar to shoot pool beside the couples dancing bachata under the watchful eye of the Portuguese wrestler/owner, and then to the Bar Skala on Park, with the angry men shouting about politics as they guzzled quart bottles of Carling Black Label.

Looking back, I cannot fault myself for those nocturnal fugues into the night. It was a personal boot camp, The outdoors were freezing, but inside it was the heat of madness and sensuality, and the collective urge to yield to demi-urges and blend in with the night. And, of course, at my own peril, I took no account of the red zones I was moving into, and the perils that awaited me.

But it cured me of the genocide. And, after I had finished the first Defence Brief, and waded through the slaughter, the blood, the propaganda, in ten days, I had completed the first brief. Daouda called me from Arusha.

“It’s a miracle! You are a genius.”

But I had peeled away a layer of my soul, and could only mouth the following words:

“I’ll send you my invoice in the morning.”

***

Case IV – Patient Zero

There is an inversely proportional ratio between the time spent in this confinement and the freedom it initially affords. If you are born with the gift – and it gives me no pleasure to say that I definitely fit the mould of that cursed designation – then a revolving door of successive Faustian bargains opens up. Mine occurred – my second epiphany as it were – when I translated a medical report into French for the largest law firm in Canada, which I will refer to as M&T. The case concerned a Haitian boy brought to emergency, tested and died almost immediately – as it turned out due to a rare blood disorder – and could in no way be attributed to any medical fault in the ordinary course of events. Novus actus interveniens. The physician – Dr K – was careful, meticulous to a fault – and sat firmly on the ethical fence or procedural correctness, a stance that virtually guaranteed immunity for this latest in a long string of defendants, the Quebec medical association, who were innocent of this, but collectively guilty for the AIDS blood transfusion catastrophe.

But, what no-one knew is that the translator of the case – me - had worked and watched barristers at DSMD defend guilty doctors while spreading an unfounded lie that a young and affable flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas was Patient Zero. I had come up against someone who was Dugas’ last lover, somebody who had every single STD extant – herpes, gonorrhoea, syphilis, he’d gone blind in one eye and then the other while driving in downtown traffic in Montreal. All of that was horrible enough, but it was worse to listen to the solicitors laughing in disgust as they read off the litany of diseases suffered by Dugas’ lover.

I knew that the Haitian case was weak and hung by a thread. But I decided to do something about it, and altered ever so slightly the part of the medical report that would bring in liability on the part of the hospital – through their procedures ironically – and yet save the doctor defendant. And it worked. I had altered the course of the case, and the presiding judge awarded damages. No-one had thought to question the translation, and yet the difference between the English and French versions was fundamental.

***

Case V – Deus Sex Machina

St Mary’s Hospital, I learned through a translator, was a code for a series of S&M clubs that knew no social boundaries and for a time dominated the late phases of the Montreal night until that fad fell out of popular taste in the 1990s, having achieved its purpose. It reflected perfectly the socio-economic and gender changing of the guard in the inner sanctum of the downtown area. There was a Catholic, liturgical, inquisitional side to the rituals that perfectly mirrored the social and corporate reality being played out in the downtown towers. In itself, it meant nothing more than amateur kitsch that was laughable. What I witnessed was commedia improvviso. But at St Mary’s hospital, a near absolute latitude was allowed to the capocomico, who also appeared in our performances. And, I am convinced that in the end, this art-erotic form would not have emerged in the subterranean climes had it not been for the corresponding decline of the Catholic church in the public agora.

To the outsider, and perhaps in the end, fundamentally, it meant nothing, unless you were into Venetian masked balls, and impostures, that require an embedded superficiality in the attendees. But this play, in every sense of the word required a deep commitment on the part of role players and once again I found that self-abnegation – the erasure of my essence as a person, was reasserting itself, as a rooted process that was existentially enveloping me.

There were simple phrases that resonated within me, leitmotifs that were like confetti on my unhappy life – that society was the reflection of the individual – and due to my estrangement with my father, I was governed by the thought that every indignity I suffered was altering the chemical and moral mosaic of my being. And, I had begun laying the basis for my charting of this in a series of books.

One particular day during this mezzanine phase, I was sitting across from Luciani, dancer, photographer, protégée of Merce Cunningham, brilliant literary translator and aficionado in the rituals of the Z club, one of the most radical S&M popular clubs in Mile-End in those times. We were discussing translation, this time of a novel I’d written.

“I found your book interesting. Particularly the bondage scene.”

“One of many.”

“Possibly.”

“Seriously, it’s backdrop. Nothing more to it.”

“You’re an adept. I can tell you. So am I. Or, I should say was. I’m out now.”

She looked at me, sizing me up.

“Let me put it this way. It’s the only thing I’ve ever found to replace Catholicism, eviscerated of its spiritual content.”

“I’m interested. What is Catholicism eviscerated of its spiritual intent?”

She laughed.

“Ritual, baby, ritual. Being and nothingness. Like falling into a pit.”

“Sounds self-defeating. Not my gig, thanks.”

“No it’s not. It’s a centrepiece to your story, don’t tell me any different. You’re an adept, a disciple.”

“What makes you such an expert?”

She threw a book on the table.

“Read this.”

The book was title Sex Vox Dominam, concerning a man who during a nocturnal derive in Paris, fell into a S&M cult.

“Never thought you’d be a reader of low-end pulp.”

“It’s not pulp. It’s a manual. A bible. If you agree, I’ll take you there tonight.”

I agreed to accompany Lucioni to a club just off the Main in the Mile-End district. On the third floor, there was a series of rooms. She took me into one of them with a drawing of the goddess Themis on the door. Inside, twelve well-dressed business-people sitting at the edge of a one-way, oval mirror on the floor, looking into a room, as if at a Ouija table. Visible through this aquarium like device was a silver-haired man strapped to the bed, and a woman dressed in a mask and in black leather, carrying a cat-of-nine tails. I recognized them. It was the Board of Directors of DSMD. The man on the bed was Zigby. And, the woman wielding the whip was Manon. What I witnessed was disturbing in the extreme. I resigned from DSMD the next day.

***

Case VI – A Matter of the Heart

Coincidentally, a contract was to prove a junction of sorts and brought me back from the edge where too many translators had gone over and perished, as usual in my case through pure serendipity and due to no merit of my own. MacDonald was a friend and one of the crême-de-la-crême Creative Directors in Toronto before that business was razed to the ground by the globalists. A CEO from a Japanese multinational electronics company, had decided that he wanted to remake his company in the image of a single thematic. Without naming it, he was looking for a concept that reflected his corporate entity – what it was, what the employers were , its history, its essence, its weltanschauung, its zeitgeist. He wanted it reflected in some kind of ideogram, a one letter expression of everything inside his empire building brain.

I hired three English to Japanese translators, one of whom was a specialist in haiku, and we set to work around the concepts of truth, the heart and lifestyle.

These were pure translators, so they were handing me nuanced ideograms, with contextual texture. It was craft elevated into art.

To answer the question raised in this article, you don’t choose to become a translator. It’s in the form of a Babellian curse. Caught in the core division of every human being, but lived out by translators, one and all.

De Nerval was the first to coin the phrase:“ je suis l’autre”.

Le traducteur, c’est lui l’autre.

About David J. MacKinnon

David J. MacKinnon is a Sorbonne graduate in history cum laude, a member of two law societies, and has translated for the international criminal tribunals of Rwanda, the Hague and Yugoslavia. He served on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Association of Legal Translators, and is co-founder and Director of the Long March to Rome, an indigenous-led mission seeking repeal of the Papal Bulls of Discovery. In earlier days, he worked as oil field roughneck, toilet factory worker, longshoreman and morgue attendant. He has walked the ancient Santiago de Compostela pilgrim’s trail and to Chartres several times. His previous books include Leper Tango, The Eel, A Voluntary Crucifixion, and a critically-acclaimed translation of radio interviews of the French vagabond poet Blaise Cendrars in Blaise Cendrars Speaks.

Most recently, MacKinnon is the translator of an absorbing new English translation of essays by French-Swiss essayist, novelist, and vagabond poet, Blaise Cendrars, A Dangerous Life – Sewermen, Bank Robbers & the Revelations of the Prince of Fire: True Tales from the Life and Times of Blaise Cendrars, The World’s Greatest Vagabond.

This essay series features seven Cendrars works—The Sewerman of London: a tale of a secret passage leading to the Bank of England, gleaned from a fellow legionnaire while trapped in the trenches of the Great War; River of Blood (J’ai saigné), the first-hand narrative of the killing fields of Champagne, and the day in 1916 he lost his writing hand to a German machine-gunner; Fébronio—Cendrars’ chilling and compelling interview with Brazil’s most infamous serial voodoo killer; The Diamond Circle: the tale of the discovery of a diamond with a curse; Hip-flask of blood (Bidon de sang): translation by Cendrars of an unpublished spaghetti-western novel by the bank robber lawyer Al Jennings; Le Saint Inconnu (The Anonymous Saint); Anecdotique: On Saint-Exupéry.

Translator David MacKinnon has brought Cendrars’ to brilliant life for English-speaking audiences, immersing readers in Cendrars’ attention to the forgotten of the world—of those who are not necessarily impoverished, but off the beaten track.