I’ve been spending a lot of time with the dictionary lately. Either I’m getting smarter or my Collins Concise is woefully out of date. We’ve been on-again off-again since high school. Seen some rough patches. My mother said I’d never get anywhere in life because I can’t spell. How can you look up a word if you can’t spell it? So the Collins got shelved. I mostly just talked my way through art school. And then spellcheck came along. So many obstacles between the dictionary and me. But we’ve always pulled through. 
This may seem like a digression, but bear with me. Last month Stéphane and I went to a dinner party. We were all quite drunk by the time we noticed the three saris hanging overhead. We fell into a “how to wrap a sari” discussion with two French philosophers, three new media artists, a documentary filmmaker and a translator. Do they wear underwear underneath? We all wanted to know. Do they use pins? They must use pins. I said: The ancient Romans pinned their togas at the shoulder. Oh what is that word? The translator exclaimed! When she was a child her favourite dictionary had a picture of a toga pin in it. She’d memorized the word. Now here was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use it in public and she couldn’t remember it. I said: Who cares if you don’t remember it, I’ve just fallen in love with you for falling in love with the word for a toga pin! That’s when Stéphane piped up. Fibula, he said. The word is fibula. Needless to say I went home with him.
We walked the translator part of the way home. She said: You know when people say: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book? Well I’d want it to be a dictionary. If I were stranded on a desert island and could only have one translator I’d want it to be her. Or my brave friend Daniel Canty. He translated the text of Les huit quartiers du sommeil this summer. Pauvre lui. But that’s what he gets for getting me started writing on the theme of sleep in the first place. Somehow when he invited me to submit something to Le Livre du chevete, the third anthology in the La table des matières series published by Quartanier, it didn’t sink in that whatever I wrote would only appear in print in French. I have no idea how long it took Daniel to translate les huit quartiers. It took me six hours to learn how to read, in French, what I had written in English. And that was with the aide of a gigantic Le Robert & Collins French-English dictionary left over from the decades when my French Canadian mother-in-law was an English teacher at Ecole Secondaire Paul-Gérin-Lajoie. I made copious notes on possible replacements for all kinds of words that I thought were errors until Stéphane explained that in most cases they were in fact such brilliant translations that they went right over my head. When I went to meet with Daniel to discuss the text you better believe the Robert & Collins came with me. When he saw it he said: That’s a big dictionary. But it won’t help you.
The next week I handed in an essay for a publication commemorating the tenth anniversary of Studio XX, a feminist art centre in Montréal dedicated to providing women access to technology. Given how complicated the translation of les huit quartiers du sommeil had been, I thought I’d keep this essay simple. It turns out that simple English is the hardest thing to translate into French. I wrote a light-hearted third-person-plural pre-history called: Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together. The first thing I realized when I got the text back from the translator was that that whimsical title is utterly untranslatable. Something else was wrong too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Le Robert & Collins was no help. Finally I got Stéphane to look at it. He pointed out that although it is perfectly correct for the third person plural to default to masculine subject-verb agreement in French, in this case, because Studio XX is a feminist organization, all the people in the “we” are women so everything has to agree with the feminine. In my humble opinion, even if Studio XX were a centre dedicated to providing men access to technology, like all the other centres, the translation was still a little flat. As Dr. Michael J. Boyce later pointed out: “The piece is a very good example of the difficulty involved in any translation of any sort of writing that is indelibly stamped with the personality of the writer. The difficulty is not registered in the machinery of transliteration, but rather with the task of capturing its authorship. In this respect, the translator’s failure to capture voice in the grammatical sense is only symptomatic, I am sure, of his inability to grasp the spirit, the soul, the personality – in sooth, the voice – of the writing. To coin a phrase, he just didn’t get it.” Fortunately a second translator was called it and once the gender issues were cleared up I was able to see ways to reinsert my voice. As in writing, as in life.
In the midst of all this translating, I mentioned to my mother-in-law that I was using the hell out of her old dictionary – though not quite in those words. She said she had an extra French-only dictionary if I wanted it and I said: Yes! Absolutely. Then she said she had an English-only dictionary that had the meanings in it, did I want that? I said: But I already know what the words mean in English!
Now I regret that hasty decision. Over the weekend the spine of my geriatric Collins Concise cracked in half at ke: keel over, to collapse suddenly. Now it’s very hard to flip through. Which is really too bad because I’ve recently become addicted to Scrabble – a game I swore I’d never play. Sure I’m witty with words in a cutting cocktail chatter kind of way. And I do write for a living. So you’d think I’d just love Scrabble. But if you had descended from the long line of grammar snobs, spelling fascists and cryptic crossword puzzle fanatics that I did, I assure you, you’d rather chew your own arm off than play Scrabble. So what gives? For one thing I’m not really addicted to Scrabble but rather to Scrabulous, a far superior game. First off all, it’s online. We as a society are no longer limited to playing board games with whomever we happen to be stuck spending the holiday long weekend with. Now we can play long tedious drawn out board games with people we actually like. And we can eat and drink and walk the dog and talk on the phone and maybe even get some work done in between moves. If that’s not progress I don’t know what is. Our chances of sustaining out friendships with our favourite opponents in real life are greatly improved now that we don’t have to endure the sight of their smug scheming or listen to their clucking with triple word score delight. My favourite thing about Scrabulous – you get to use the dictionary! This is great opportunity for Collins Concise and I to spend some quality time together before it falls apart altogether and I trade up to Oxford English. So please don’t tell the old dogeared dear that there’s dictionary built into the Scrabulous application. And a list of two-letter words. Finally, world domination is within my reach! Um, well, word domination at least.
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