Description

---

A quietly affecting modern fairy tale told with humor and warmth, Translation is a Love Affair is a slender novel of immense humanity. A Quebecois novelist with a bad back and his vivacious young translator discover a stray cat with an SOS attached to its collar. They embark upon a search for its owner, and when they discover a young girl with bandaged wrists they are drawn into a mystery they don't dare neglect. The world Poulin creates is haunted by dark memories, isolation, and tragedy, yet it is a world in which language - and love - are the most immediate and vital forces, where one human being hearing a cry of distress of another is compelled to shed one's own inhibitions to respond. 

About the Author

---

Born in Saint-Gédéon-de-Beauce, Jacques Poulin is the author of fourteen novels. Among his many honors are the Governor General's Award, the Molson Prize in the Arts, the Gilles-Corbeil Prize, and the France-Québec Prize. He lives in Québec City.

Sheila Fischman has published more than 125 translations of contemporary French-Canadian. Fischman was named to the Order of Canada in 2002 and to the Ordre national du Québec in 2008; in the same year she received the Molson Prize in the Arts.

Praise For…

---

For Jacques Poulin, in this miniature masterpiece of tenderness and humor, translation is more than the passage from language to language, it is the essence of our human condition: giving and taking, teaching and learning, experiencing and sharing experience, a love affair with our fellow human beings. —Alberto Manguel

One of my favorite writers in the world is Jacques Poulin. —Rawi Hage

One of the finest and most underrated novelists in Québec. —The Globe & Mail

We fall under the spell of this heartwarming, human novel, penned by Jacques Poulin at the summit of his art. —Mieux Vivre

If familiarity and surprise have become the trademark of Poulin’s novels, it is evident that Translation Is a Love Affair does not deviate from this model; and Poulin’s reader continues to read it as if he / she would pay a visit to relatives, as much to reoccupy a familiar world as to discover that which is new. —Canadian Literature

... these sentences that have been stripped, pumiced and polished until only the beauty of the grain remains, the fine drawing of time and patience....  'Language is the house of being,' says Jack Waterman, alter ego of Jacques Poulin, quoting Heidegger.  This house that Jacques Poulin fixes up and decorates, book by book, is a refuge where it is nice to come warm up. —Entre les lignes

Translation is a love story? Absolutely, just as that of readers with Jacques Poulin’s novels. This one will not disappoint them. —Trouver le traducteur en nous

Jacques Poulin’s writing is always a fortuitous encounter.  With each new book, the "little melody" created by Poulin refines the hypersensitivity of his literary project.  This new novel that he offers, short and dense, once again shows that the pleasure of storytelling, entirely feline, is for him a poetics of writing itself. Here is an irresistible book that fans of Jacques Poulin’s will read with delight, written with heart and passion and carried by suppressed emotion, touching and sincere. —LÉMEAC: Communiqué

A novel of carefully weighed words... it speaks to Poulin's talents that he can present what is, in its outlines, such a cloying plot without putting off the reader. — The Complete Review