What is it about?
In 1658 in Québec, a play performed by schoolboys of French descent featured a striking figure: a forest spirit who served as an interpreter. This intermediary translated lines spoken in Indigenous languages into French, presenting the translingual scenarios to the colonial governor of New France. The play’s rendering of an interpreter mirrors historical accounts from colonial New France, raising intriguing questions. How did this theatrical figure embody linguistic knowledge and the oral translation process? How did historical writings of the time depict interpreters in ways that aligned with or diverged from this portrayal? And what might its fictional role as a forest spirit suggest in the colonial context?
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Photo by Timothée Geenens on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This chapter explores interpreters represented in both theatrical and historical contexts – figures who, due to the oral nature of their work, remain less documented than translators who produced written texts. The theatrical interpreter is not only an innovative figure in francophone and Canadian literature but also a representation of linguistic mediation. As a forest spirit fluent in Indigenous languages unfamiliar to Europeans, it transcends the common depiction of interpreters of French descent, signifying how encounters in the Americas moulded European conceptions of multilingualism.
Perspectives
My interest in this theatrical context began in the spring of 2020. During the lockdown, I revisited an earlier drama, Marc Lescarbot’s Le Théâtre de Neptune (1606), for my thesis research at the University of Cambridge. I synchronised the document to my digital paper tablet and, with my stylus in hand, engaged in a form of armchair reading. At that time, I worked through francophone scholarship in Canada at a slow pace, including the writings of Baudouin Burger and Luc Lacourcière.
Dr Weiao Xing
University of Waterloo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Representing Interpreters in Theater and History in Seventeenth-Century New France, February 2025, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004695566_010.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Reading French-Indigenous Encounters from the Francophone Scholarship in Canada
A blog post in ‘Languages across Borders: Language Collections at the University of Cambridge’, Cambridge University Libraries.
The Christmas Eve of 1647 in the Journal des Jésuites
A blog post from the ‘Advent Calendar 2022’ in ‘Doing History in Public’.
Contributors
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