Ray Ellenwood standing next to a portrait of Claude Gauvreau done in 1993 by the Ontario painter Milton Jewell (photo by Brenda Ellenwood)
No Small Task
Translating a dense, enigmatic work
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois
Ray Ellenwood is a retired professor of English, York University, author of ten books of translation, French-to-English, mostly of Québec literature, including the manifesto, Refus global, by the Montreal Automatist Movement. Besides a number of articles on the Automatists, he has published Egregore: A History of the Automatist Movement of Montreal (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992) and expects to see an augmented French version published in 2013. Meanwhile, he amuses himself by writing catalogue essays on the Automatists in general, on visual artists such as Pierre Gauvreau, Rita Letendre, Ludwig Zeller and Peter Por, as well as texts for the Toronto archive, Dance Collection Danse, on choreographers Jeanne Renaud and Françoise Riopelle.
CHARPO: For those who don't know him, tell us about your Claude Gauvreau. (For instance, do you think he fell or killed himself?)
ELLENWOOD: As a young man, Claude was introduced to the gang of artists that would become the Montreal Automatist Movement. That was around 1943. Already a precocious thinker and writer, he became a major spokesman for the movement and for "living art" in general. Besides diatribes against a moribund cultural establishment in Montreal, he wrote poems and "dramatic objects" that stretched the boundaries of the genres, experimenting with what he called "explorational language," insisting that he had gone beyond the French surrealists and the lettristes. In the beginning, his efforts were often met with ridicule, but he gradually developed a following of young people struck by his intransigent sense of liberty and his courageous experiments. In 1952, the death by suicide of Muriel Guilbault, an actress whom he admired to the point of obsession, caused a breakdown that was a precursor to a series of mental and emotional problems that dogged Gauvreau for the rest of his life. But he continued to militate, and to create a substantial body of work. The first production of one of his long plays, la charge de l'orignal épormyable, happened in 1970, and it was a flop. Within a year, rehearsals had begun for a production of another major play, les oranges sont vertes, and that was well received. Between these two events, Gauvreau fell from the roof of his apartment to a death many regard as suicide, though it was never officially called that. Since then, he has become a kind of cult figure in Québec identified with the anti-conservative forces that have shaped its modern culture.
