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“This is a portrait of the artist as a young woman”: Linda Leith on translating The Bigamist
Felicia Mihali’s The Bigamist (Linda Leith Publishing) is a striking portrait of a young woman torn between two lives—one rooted in her past in Bucharest, the other unfolding in Montreal. Sharp humour and emotional depth punctuate the struggles of a woman determined to shape her own destiny through literature.
Linda Leith, the novel’s translator and publisher, reflects on how translating the book became a literary dialogue between two writers who understand what it means to build a life through words.
By Linda Leith
Felicia asked me to translate her novel, La bigame, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why.
She and I got to know each other when I was running the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival twenty years ago, and we have worked together many times since.
We have much in common as writers, translators, and literary publishers—she founded Éditions Hashtag some years after I launched Linda Leith Publishing.
We have read each other’s work, and we have both lived and worked in French, English, and other languages. Though there are as many differences as there are similarities in our life experience, we are both literary women.
The novel appealed to me, first of all, for its vivid account of a young woman immigrant who is torn between two very different men—and of the ways in which her husband is linked with the life she knew in Bucharest, while her lover is linked with her new life in Montreal.
The novel’s searing depiction of a traditional immigrant community in Montreal and of the various neighbourhoods she gets to know was part of the appeal, too, for this is a whole new take on the immigrant experience in Canada.
The novel is full of humour, not a little horror, suspense, love, death, seduction, frustration, and a kind of quiet female determination that has rarely been so eloquently dramatized.
And the clincher, for me, was the very reason this woman came here in the first place.
This is a woman who uprooted herself and her not entirely willing husband in order to read voluminously and in order to study, which she did at Université de Montréal, where she got a Master’s degree in postcolonial literature.
And what she makes clear from the outset is that she did all this in order to become a writer.
While she seems almost comically incapable of choosing between the two men in her life, she is clear-sighted from the start about her purpose, which is wholeheartedly literary.
Stuffed with allusions to and quotations from writers as various as Edith Wharton and Hanif Kureishi, Mo Yan and Elfriede Jelinek, this is a portrait of the artist as a young woman.
As a writer who has been exploring that very terrain in my own recent books, what I love best about The Bigamist is its wholeheartedly literary quality.
So, I soon figured out the reason Felicia asked me to translate her novel: she knew I’d get it.
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LLP Publisher Linda Leith is the author of Marrying Hungary (Signature Editions, 2008) and, most recently The Girl from Dream City: A Literary Life (University of Regina Press, 2021).
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