I Never Talk About It

Cupcakes, panda bears, break-ups, wearing sunglasses at night... The local and the universal come together in these 37 short stories, brought into English by different translators from all over the world. This project aims to show there are all kinds of ways to bring across an author's voice in translation… at least 37 of them (one for each story). Translators include literary translation students, first-time and up-and-coming literary translators, world-renowned translators who have won major international prizes (Peter Bush, Ros Schwartz), some of Montreal's best writers and translators (Dimitri Nasrallah, Neil Smith, Lori Saint-Martin), a retired high-school French teacher in Ireland, and francophone authors translating into their second language (Daniel Grenier, Guillaume Morissette). There are even people in there who (armed only with a dictionary and the priceless ability to write a beautiful sentence) barely speak French. Readers don't find out the translator's name until they've absorbed their work, with translators explaining their background and approach at the end. More than a fascinating translation exercise, I Never Talk About It is a long-overdue translation of one of the strongest stort story collections to come out of Quebec in recent years.