There is an old trope that Cana­di­an and Québé­cois soci­ety is divid­ed between ​“two soli­tudes,” that life here is defined by an unbridge­able cul­tur­al divide between the country’s Eng­lish and French-speak­ing pop­u­la­tions. While pun­dits and politi­cians may debate the extent to which this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion still holds true in gen­er­al, in a recent essay fran­coph­o­ne his­to­ri­an Pierre Anc­til makes a con­vinc­ing argu­ment that this lin­guis­tic divide is still a defin­ing fea­ture of the field of Cana­di­an Jew­ish Studies. ^{1 1} Pierre Anc­til, ​“Which Cana­da Are We Talk­ing About? An Eng­lish-Lan­guage Polemic about French in Cana­di­an Jew­ish His­to­ry” in No Bet­ter Home?: Jews, Cana­da, and the Sense of Belong­ing, ed. David Koff­man (Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to Press, 2021), 284 – 296. In his point­ed but good-natured cri­tique, Anc­til details how anglo­phone schol­ars in the field have over­looked French lan­guage schol­ar­ship and pri­ma­ry sources, built a his­to­ri­og­ra­phy over­ly reliant on cer­tain out-of-date mono­graphs, and con­struct­ed analy­ses that are often based on ahis­tor­i­cal notions about French-Cana­di­an his­to­ry and its pur­port­ed­ly inher­ent anti-Semi­tism. In part as a cre­ative response to Anctil’s lat­est cri de coeur, I offer here a trans­la­tion of an icon­ic Québé­cois text into Yid­dish for the first time, name­ly Émile Nelligan’s ​“Soir d’hiver” (Win­ter Evening).

This present trans­la­tion project can be fur­ther sit­u­at­ed with­in a his­to­ry of cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal ini­tia­tives cre­at­ed over the last sev­er­al decades that have sought to facil­i­tate exchange, con­nec­tion, and rap­proche­ment between the his­tor­i­cal­ly Catholic fran­coph­o­ne pop­u­la­tion of Québec and the province’s Jews. This includes orga­ni­za­tions dat­ing back to the late 1940s, such as Le Cer­cle juif de la langue française, a project of the now defunct Cana­di­an Jew­ish Con­gress; the Insti­tut québé­cois sur la cul­ture juive and Dia­logue St-Urbain, two orga­ni­za­tions Anc­til him­self was involved with in the late 1980s and ear­ly 1990s; and the more recent Friends of Hutchi­son Street/​Les Amis de la rue Hutchi­son, a project that began in 2011 to pro­mote under­stand­ing between fran­coph­o­nes and Hasidim in their shared Mon­tréal neigh­bour­hood of Out­remont. My trans­la­tion also harkens back to Goldie Morgentaler’s 1992 trans­la­tion of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-soeurs, a clas­sic play depict­ing Québé­cois work­ing class life and lan­guage that was staged as Di shvigerins by Montréal’s Dora Wasser­man Yid­dish The­atre in that same year.

Émile Nel­li­gan (1879−1941) has achieved the sta­tus of a nation­al poet in Québec, his name grac­ing the sides of school build­ings, gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions, and a major lit­er­ary prize. His work, com­posed entire­ly dur­ing a short three-year peri­od in his late teens, has drawn com­par­isons to Arthur Rim­baud for its youth­ful urgency, inten­si­ty, and lyri­cism. Nelligan’s career was cut short by a diag­no­sis of schiz­o­phre­nia at the age of 20 and decades of sub­se­quent insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion, a fact that has spurred crit­ics and schol­ars to read nation­al and soci­etal trau­mas into his biog­ra­phy and body of work. The twin afflic­tions of mad­ness and genius, these read­ings seem to sug­gest, could have been caused by the pre­sumed incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of Nelligan’s lin­guis­tic parent­age (an abu­sive anglo­phone father and a dot­ing fran­coph­o­ne moth­er); the poet’s inabil­i­ty to rec­on­cile Catholic Québec’s sup­pos­ed­ly uni­ver­sal misog­y­ny and anti-Semi­tism — some of which appears in his work itself — with his wider human­i­tar­i­an val­ues; and, in more recent inter­pre­ta­tions, by his sta­tus as an alleged­ly queer writer, liv­ing clos­et­ed in a deeply con­ser­v­a­tive soci­ety. Despite, or per­haps because of these many pos­si­ble con­tra­dic­tions and imag­i­na­tive read­ings as well as the lush­ness of his verse, Nelligan’s work remains wide­ly read, stud­ied, trans­lat­ed, sung, staged, and debat­ed in Québec today.

Writ­ten in 1889 and first pub­lished in 1902, ​“Soir d’hiver” is one of Nelligan’s most beloved texts, not only because it so clear­ly evokes the icy fea­tures of Québec’s win­try cli­mate, but also the mixed feel­ings of both melan­choly and vigour that this weath­er can inspire. It was set to music by Claude Léveil­lée in 1965 and sung by the famed Québé­coise diva Monique Leyrac. The present trans­la­tion draws inspi­ra­tion from the work of Cana­di­an Yid­dishist activist H.M. Cais­er­man (1884−1950). As Anc­til and scholar/​writer/​translator Chan­tal Ringuet have uncov­ered, Cais­er­man saw the devel­op­ment of French-Cana­di­an lit­er­a­ture in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, with its resis­tance to assim­i­la­tion into Eng­lish, as a mod­el for the sur­vival of Yid­dish cul­ture in Cana­da. Cais­er­man is known to have trans­lat­ed sev­er­al of Nelligan’s lit­er­ary con­tem­po­raries, but nev­er pub­lished this work. ^{2 2} Anc­til, Pierre, ​“H.-M. Cais­er­man et l’École lit­téraire de Mon­tréal. Vers une explo­ration en yid­dish du Cana­da français. ” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 66(1), 65 – 83. https://​www​.eru​dit​.org/​e​n​/jour…; Chan­tal Ringuet, ​“Translin­gual migra­tions : From mono­lin­gual­ism to ​“con­tra­pun­tu­al trans­la­tion”: Two Yid­dish Case Stud­ies (paper pre­sent­ed at The Asso­ci­a­tion for Jew­ish Stud­ies Con­fer­ence, San Diego, Cal­i­for­nia, Decem­ber 18 – 20, 2016). In a small way, this trans­la­tion also com­ple­ments the grow­ing body of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture now avail­able in Québé­cois French as trans­lat­ed by Anc­til, Ringuet, and others.

In my trans­la­tion, an attempt has been made to retain much of the rhyme and rhythm of the orig­i­nal and to choose, in a few small instances, Yid­dish dialec­tal forms that nod to Québé­cois French’s non-stan­dard sta­tus. The atten­tive read­er will notice that many of the images in the orig­i­nal French have been reshaped or ellid­ed as I attempt­ed to recre­ate Nelligan’s form and prosody. At the same time, read­ers of Yid­dish poet­ry may rec­og­nize an echo of the sym­bol­ist poets of Di yunge, such as Mani Leyb and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, whose style also influ­enced my trans­la­tion choic­es. By bring­ing this text into Yid­dish, I hope to under­score the neces­si­ty for more com­par­a­tive, lin­guis­ti­cal­ly rich schol­ar­ship and to encour­age Yid­dish speak­ers and oth­ers invest­ed in Cana­di­an Jew­ish Stud­ies to con­nect more ful­ly with the work of fran­coph­o­ne Quebeckers.

Click here to down­load a PDF of the text and translation.