Public reading: Joseph Boyden
Wednesday, June 20, 8 p.m. · Free · Rolston Recital Hall, The Banff Centre
Presented as part of the 2007 Banff Summer Arts Festival
Award-winning author Joseph Boyden will be at The Banff Centre for a week in June, working with translator Greg Spence, who is translating Boyden’s acclaimed novel, Three Day Road, into Cree. As part of his participation in the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC) program, Boyden will give a public reading from his novel on June 20 in The Banff Centre’s Rolston Recital Hall.
“Though Cree is one of the most widely used North American native languages, I have noticed that fewer and fewer children are fluent,” Boyden says. “It’s crucial to give back these stories in their language. As far as we know, this is the first-ever translation of a novel into Cree.”
The story of two Cree snipers who fought in the First World War, Three Day Road received the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award, and was nominated for the 2005 Governor General’s Literary Award. The novel is loosely based on the life of Corporal Francis Pegahmagabow, the most highly decorated Aboriginal soldier in Canadian history.
A former teacher of communications and general arts and sciences to Native students at Northern College in Moosonee, Ontario, Boyden’s first book was Born with a Tooth. A collection of stories set on Northern reserves and narrated by First Nations characters, the book was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award. His writing has appeared in publications including Potpourri, Cimarron Review, Blue Penny Quarterly, BlackWarrior, and The Panhandler. He divides his time between Northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans.
Boyden first participated in BILTC in 2006, working with the French and Dutch translators on Three Day Road. Founded in 2003 and the only program of its kind in North America, BILTC is an annual three-week residency for established translators. They’re given the time and space for uninterrupted work on current publication projects, often with the writers whose work they’re translating. The program focuses on translations of Canadian publications into a variety of international languages, and the translation of international works of fiction into French, Spanish and English for readers in Canada, the United States and Mexico. Writers who have participated in the program have included Yann Martel, Ann-Marie Macdonald, and Edward P. Jones.
