Les Belles Soeurs (The Sisters-in-Law) Book

TRANSLATION INTO MODERN SCOTS

While The Guid Sisters (a translation of Michel Tremblay's absolutely brilliant and often wildly humorous, but nevertheless always critical, even at times infuriatingly heartbreaking drama Les Belles-Soeurs into modern Scots by William Findlay and Martin Bowman) does indeed faithfully keep to both the general and particular themes and contents of Tremblay's French (Canadian) original, and while I actually do very much appreciate the sense of working class parlance that this here translation into a specific sociolect has been able to present (and much more so than the rather pale and for the most part sadly mundane and listless translations of Les Belles-Soeurs into standard English, as the Joual, the working class parlance of East End Montreal that the author, that Tremblay uses in Les Belles-Soeurs does give such colour and so much life to both the content and the presentation of the same, something that is completely lost in the standard English translations and happily retained with and by the use of modern Scots), the fact that modern Scots is of course generally spoken in Scotland (and of course as such specifically in the working class areas of cities like Edinburgh and in particular Glasgow), that salient truth and fact does tend to give an odd and at times rather troubling sense of cultural and linguistic disconnection to the reader (or if watching The Guid Sisters at the theatre, this would of course change to the observer and/or listener).

For even though the featured characters now ALL speak modern Scots in Findlay's and Bowman's translation (or with some of the characters, nuances of modern Scots), the specifics of time and of place are of course and in their entirety still totally and absolutely working class East End Montreal, Canada (in the 1950s and 1960s), and it does (at least to me and for me on a personal level) feel more than potentially disconcerting to have Germaine Lauzon and the rest of the featured characters chatter on and away in modern Scots about specific Montreal landmarks, specific French Canadian scenarios (and then to have the entire cast at the end come together at the end of the play and sing Oh Canada! really does feel so exceedingly strange, it really majorly does make me shake my head in and with some consternation and perplexing confusion).

And thus, while I certainly do in every way much and gladly prefer The Guid Sisters to the translations of Les Belles-Soeurs into standard English, it is still and remains a rather oddly bizarre reading (or potential viewing) experience (and while I do definitely and somewhat recommend The Guid Sisters, Michel Tremblay's original French Canadian version, with its Joual, with its Montreal specific parlance, is really to be preferred and massively so, in every way, especially if potential readers or theatre goers can and do read/understand French and have intermediate to advanced levels of language fluency). And frankly, with The Guid Sisters, I think I would personally actually much favour an adaptation over a simple translation, of having the time and place of the original, of Les Belles-Soeurs moved from Montreal to, say, Glasgow, as I think this would definitely lessen the potential sense of cultural and geographic, linguistic estrangement, whilst keeping, whilst retaining the spirit of Michel Tremblay's original, its contents, the themes and the presented, depicted issues, struggles etc. faced by the working classes everywhere.