Saint Urbain’s Quiet Revolutionary

I

Adam Gopnik identifies three familiar Richlers, the Montrealer, the diasporic Jew, and the London expatriate, before arguing for the predominance of a fourth, the colonial émigré who returns from the declining imperial capital to an economically and culturally expansive homeland. Yet there is at least one more Richler. Gopnik restricts his analysis to English parallels, but Richler also has a place in Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Like many artists and intellectuals in the province’s vanguard, including Jean-Paul Riopelle, Fernand Leduc, and Mavis Gallant, Richler had decamped for Paris and other parts of Europe to escape ultramontane rule, bigotry, and parochialism, and he repatriated in 1972 the better to affront its legacy.

Like those artists Richler was hostile to State paternalism, religious orthodoxy, censorship, and social cant. As a social progressive critical of conservative religious dominance (his grandfather Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg had been a prominent rabbi as well as prolific writer), Richler was not unlike those francophone coevals who repudiated clerical authoritarianism. He favoured what, in the Automatist manifesto Refus Global, published in 1948 but rediscovered in the 1960s, Paul-Émile Borduas hailed as an anti-Establishment realm of social as well as artistic liberty, spontaneity, and eros. Richler was flagrantly contemptuous of Anglo predominance in Quebec, celebrated what for that class was plebeian culture (including snooker, saloons, and boxing), descried moral repressiveness, and advocated secular schools and social welfare.

Repudiating the aesthetic disinterestedness canonized by his modernist precursors, in fiction no less than in squib, feuilleton, and newspaper column, Richler seized the mantle of campaigner and mobilizer that the Quiet Revolution fostered, as prominently characterized by such writers as Gaston Miron, Hubert Aquin, and Gérald Godin. Quebec became a crucible for an abrasively engaged literature by highly visible renegades whom Richler joined. Though his promotion of Michel Tremblay is well known, Richler’s overlooked continuities with firebrands like Aquin, Jacques Godbout, and such fellow Juif Québécois iconoclasts as Régine Robin correct stereotypes of the Quiet Revolution as a homogenous catalyst for nationalist culture and political independence. Though adversarial to separatism, Richler joined many of his prominent francophone contemporaries in embracing the persona of polemical public intellectual, and like them wrote ambivalent novels about deeply conflicted renegades.

One impetus for the present re-estimation of Richler as a Quebec writer stems from his embrace of the dissenting civic conception of authorship he shared with leading French associates—a dissent with which on many questions he agreed. In the introduction to his 1970 Penguin anthology Canadian Writing Today, which contains translations of work by twelve French authors (including the emerging Marie-Claire Blais and Réjean Ducharme), Richler denounced, for instance, the institution of the Governor General, which “is not part of the indigenous tradition, a tradition struggling to emerge, but a divisive reminder of colonial dependence, justifiably resented by the new militant French-Canadian writers, say Hubert Aquin, Jean-Guy Pilon, and Jacques Godbout, all of whom are represented in this anthology” (21). Marie Leconte notes that Québécois and anglo-Quebec literature “are discovering a way of mutual belonging” (76), and Richler’s unlikely early role should not be discounted in that enterprise. Readers of Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné’s ongoing and popular new translation of the novels for Les Éditions du Boréal have discovered that the most acerbic of Quebec’s anti-nationalists was one of its quiet revolutionaries as well.

II

Published in 1980 and freshly translated by Saint-Martin and Gagné in 2015, Joshua Then and Now takes place during the 1976 Quebec election that, for the first time, brought to power a party pledged to sovereignty. While silent on the Olympic Games hosted that very summer in Montreal, even as its protagonist is a popular sportswriter, the novel celebrates the 15 November victory of René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois as just vengeance on the province’s pampered and chauvinistic anglo elite:

As far as that party’s young activists were concerned, the reconquest had begun and now it would be the turn of the English-speaking to make bricks out of straw. But in the West End, where the English-speaking had ruled with impunity for years, each day’s news was more disheartening than the last. Joshua salvaged some joy out of imagining the terrified burghers of Upper Westmount waking each morning to read in the Gazette that yet another company’s head office had done a midnight flit, its spokesman saying, “The move of our head office to Toronto has been on the drawing board for years and has nothing to do with the present political atmosphere in Quebec.” (176-77)

One of the few unbiased characters remarks, “certainly we have been made to feel insecure, but how exciting it must be to be young and French Canadian right now” (178), while affluent moral hypocrites like the philanderer Seymour pretend regret at having missed out on the glories of the Spanish Civil War that the Parti Québécois triumph conjures. Another character mocks the hysterics of “old Jews so scared they moved their furniture against the door. The next morning you had to wait in line to get into your safety deposit box” (177).

Joshua hastens to a posh Westmount perch to see his old Saint Urbain schoolmate, now a wealthy but dyspeptic dentist: “Aglow with ill will, Joshua sought out Pinsky on Summit Circle. ‘Well, Irving, just in case you didn’t know, the value of your house has dropped twenty percent. So far’” (177). Joshua ventures, “if you ask me, René Lévesque’s not such a bad fellow.” The founder of the Parti Québécois easily attracts the admiration of Joshua, a chain-smoking, boozing, and womanizing war-zone journalist and progressivist adversary of a political establishment that unites Catholic clergy and English capital. This provokes Pinsky’s invective against French Canadians, ironically accusing them of the bigotry he himself vents. A year later Pinsky’s vehemence continues: “‘Your friend Lévesque was shitting on us again. He said the Jews were edgy. They’re bums, every one of them. A bunch of know-nothing pricks. A Jew in their mind is a stereotype’” (307- 08). To this reciprocal stereotyping Joshua challenges him to leave Quebec, which seething yet spineless Pinsky has not the courage to do.

While Quebec experiences epochal social and political change, Joshua’s smug circle of prosperous English friends play out the largely frivolous proxy wars of mid-life crisis. Like Richler’s other fiction, Joshua Then and Now levels jeremiads at the institutions of English power. Its political class is corrupted by dovetailing commercial interests that insinuate the British class system through influence over education. Thus the rector’s address at the posh private school Selwyn House makes a mockery of idealism, while McGill University is presented as exclusionist and hypocritical. Not only is the British securities trader Trimble a conniving vengeful cuckold, he is not even British, just a masquerading Montreal barber’s son who hosts opulent annual Guy Fawkes parties, “resoundingly British” in every detail, culminating in Windsor fireworks: “[T]he unmistakable images of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip leaped and spluttered before they illuminated the troubled skies of loyal Westmount, a colony besieged” (272).

The novel revels in that siege, as affluent friends discover that neither their class nor ethnic fellowship affords them welcome in Toronto. The novel includes a lengthy satirical digression on one Torontonian, Canada’s longest serving Prime Minister, who is annually jeered by Joshua’s burlesque William Lyon Mackenzie King Memorial Society. That contempt is partly explained by King’s lasting notoriety in Quebec, in part for imposing conscription after the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in 1939: a war French Canadians overwhelmingly refused to wage. Rarely in the era’s French Canadian fiction is the animus against the traditions, values, privileges, and complacency of English-speaking Quebec as caustic as here. Indeed, it was exceeded only by Richler himself in his next novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here, where disparagement of the anglo-Quebec elite is extended to pitiless satire of the Westmount arrivistes originating in his own cultural community.

III

Richler included in Canadian Writing Today translated excerpts from the novel Le Couteau sur la table by Jacques Godbout, a celebrated indépendantiste writer and filmmaker. Knife on the Table, which Richler’s publisher Jack McClelland had published in Penny Williams’ translation a year earlier, responds ambivalently to the violence of the Front de libération du Québec. Like Joshua Shapiro, or Jake Hersch in Saint Urbain’s Horseman, Godbout’s anonymous narrator is a self-divided man who, while attracted to insurgency, displaces political militancy onto dubious surrogates and personally balks at violence.

Having left the army, Godbout’s narrator vacillates between a Westmount and a working-class francophone lover, until his inertia is dispelled by the death of the latter woman on a motorcycle he had taught her to ride, and when the FLQ « a fait sa première victime, » a harmless stoker at an army recruitment centre (155). He breaks with his bilingual English girlfriend, whose father is in fact a Czech Jew and whose mother is Irish, and he anticipates joining the armed national struggle. Yet the knife stays on the table, and he joins the ranks of Richler’s posturers, like St. Urbain’s elusive horseman Joey, who does not bring Nazi Josef Mengele to justice or lead a Zionist brigade. The young Joshua buckles before the erstwhile Nazi propagandist Mueller, childishly vandalizing his Ibiza property rather than confronting him, a failure with consequences for the Jewish émigrées at whose inn Joshua lodges. And when twenty years later the shame compels his return to Ibiza, what ensues is not cathartic violence but the breakdown of his forsaken wife back in Montreal. During the filming of the screen and television adaptation of Joshua Then and Now, producer Robert Lantos implored Richler to add a narrative climax absent from the novel (Foran 515), but the screenwriter could devise nothing since Joshua is incapable of sustained meaningful action. The sense of frustrated or dissipated purpose in both Richler’s and Godbout’s novels is projected structurally as well: often short chapters out of chronological sequence, a discontinuity mirroring the meandering and stalled intentions of the protagonist.

In Canadian Writing Today, Richler also includes an excerpt from Hubert Aquin’s first novel, Prochain épisode. Aquin had been notoriously detained in 1964 on suspicion of terrorist activity after issuing a communique, published in two Montreal dailies, declaring clandestine combat at the head of an armed cell of the FLQ. Five months earlier its military faction, the Armée de libération du Québec, had raided the barracks of the Régiment des Fusiliers Mont-Royal, directly across the street from Aquin’s old Catholic school, École Jean-Jacques Olier, on Montreal’s avenue des Pins, where Aquin was then lodging. A month later the Shawinigan barracks were also raided. Aquin pleaded suicidal depression and Judge Claude Wagner, not otherwise known for clemency to suspected insurgents, had him hospitalized instead of incarcerated. Aquin claimed to have written Prochain épisode while in medical detention, like the novel’s anonymous narrator.

Published within a few months of Le Couteau sur la table in 1965, and in 1967 translated by Penny Williams for Jack McClelland, Prochain épisode coincided with further FLQ violence and, like Godbout’s novel, was regarded as a prophesy of separatist insurrection. Though an abject failure at insurrectionary violence, Aquin’s anonymous narrator foresees a terrible beauty, rather like the terrorist of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: “Après deux siècles d’agonie, nous ferons éclater la violence déréglée, série ininterrompue d’attentats et d’ondes de choc, noire épallation d’un project d’amour total . . .” (144).¹

Aquin’s narrator and Richler’s Joshua have generational affinities that their political loyalties only partly obscure: consigned to hospital beds, obsessed with both forsaken love and a failed vendetta in Europe, they live in suspension in a Quebec convulsed by sovereigntist activities parliamentary and paramilitary. Each is a vacillating political idealist who acts out the contradictions of an obsolescent model of masculinity. Each yearns to commit an act of political retribution only to squander the opportunity. Joshua is the author of a homage to Catalonia, a popular panegyric to the Republicans of the Spanish Civil War, settling in 1953 in Ibiza out of enduring fascination with the conflict. In Canada the Civil War had united French and English liberals, volunteers rushing to Catalonia under the banner of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. Rather than fomenting rebellion against the Franco dictatorship, however, Joshua entangles himself as a post-Holocaust Jew in local rivalries and eventually is ensnared and humiliated by the shadowy German émigré Mueller, whom he suspects perpetrated Nazi atrocities. Joshua’s futile return to the island almost twenty years later, on the pretext of writing an introduction to a new edition of his book on the Spanish volunteers, coincides with the mental breakdown of his neglected wife, disconsolate after her adored brother, a broker under investigation by the Securities Commission for malfeasance in a duplicitous associate’s investment firm, fatally crashes his plane.

Aquin’s narrator, like Joshua, leaves a politically divided Montreal to settle a score in Europe. He is an indépendantiste secret agent motivated in part by shame to retaliate ethnic and personal humiliations, but he is no more successful a revanchist than Joshua. Their puerile indignation—Aquin’s narrator admits to the “rage d’enfant” (113)—makes them all the more susceptible to manipulation. Joshua spars with the loathed Dr. Mueller, who sets traps for the brash Canadian innocent. Just as Aquin’s narrator reconnoitres his victim’s Alpine premises, Joshua spies on Mueller’s hilltop chalet, nearby burying a knife, le couteau sur la colline. Eventually both men break into the property of ambiguous targets with German surnames. Aquin’s agent fails to assassinate the federal counter-espionage official, while Joshua merely vandalizes the house, which becomes a pretext to force him out of the country—Mueller’s very intention. The ineffectual and enfeebled men hole up, returning to empty beds: the beautiful blonde agent K. does not make her hotel rendezvous while the beautiful blonde wife Pauline deserts her irresponsible husband. Around both women swirls suspicion of duplicity: K. is likely a double agent while Pauline’s affection for her chic brother Kevin may be incestuous. Both women assume the uneasy status of symbols. The narrator explicitly equates K. with the Quebec nation: “[P]ar mes mots, je pose mes lèvres sur la chair brûlante de mon pays” (56); “je trouve la terre meurtrie et chaude de notre invention nationale. Mon amour, tu m’es sol natal” (119).² This political gendering was common in Quebec by the mid-1960s, as in the idealization of doomed Madeleine in Knife on the Table, but ironized in a novel where K.’s real loyalties are inscrutable. Pauline, like Godbout’s Patricia, is an equally uncertain cipher of Quebec. The issue of patrician Westmount yet of mixed French-English heritage, Pauline weds the Jewish son of a striptease artist and a former prizefighter collecting for the mob, only to be lured back into the upscale world of her brother.

Joshua and Aquin’s agent represent the insecurities, frustrations, and resentments of two historically subjugated, marginal societies that, in Quebec, are subordinated to the economic and political interests of the anglo elite. Richler and Aquin dramatize masculine fantasies of resistance and reprisal that end in chagrin and torpor. The narrator of Prochain épisode is in a mental ward, a Nabokovian inmate reporting a botched scheme in which he has probably been the stooge. Indebted, convalescent, overdrinking, and unable to complete a contracted hockey book, hobbling Joshua is rescued by a deus ex machina that abruptly restores to him an abruptly and inexplicably rehabilitated Pauline.

If Richler and Aquin both appeal to the category of beauty, it is for different ends. The epigraph of Joshua Then and Now is W. H. Auden’s line “Lay your sleeping head, my love,” which stanza ends “Let the living creature lie / Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful” (Auden 107). Corruption and inconstancy do not invalidate beauty, a domestic field in Auden’s poem as it is in Richler’s novel. In Prochain épisode, beauty is erotic, clandestine, and providential: “Mon récit est interrompu, parce que je ne connais pas le premier mot du prochain épisode. Mais tout se résoudra en beauté. J’ai confiance aveuglément, même si je ne connais rien du chapitre suivant, mais rien, sinon que il m’attend et qu’il m’emportera dans un tourbillon” (143).³ The consummation of a resurgent national history will be beautiful, in whatever form it takes, be it the renewed federalism of the Constitution Act of 1982, the sovereignty-association of the 1980 and 1993 referendum proposals, or the outright independence demanded by the FLQ.

IV

Richler was not alone among Jewish Montreal writers who publicly challenged the nationalist ideology that subordinated the progressive politics of the Révolution tranquille into a campaign for sovereignty. An émigrée from France whose parents had fled Poland prior to the German occupation, Régine Robin remained until her 2020 death an outspoken advocate for cultural and linguistic diversity in Quebec. The polyglot Robin responded enthusiastically to the heterogeneity of Montreal, which in her work flouts the imposed homogeneity of Parti Québécois language legislation. A graduate of the École normale supérieure and a doctorate in History from the Sorbonne, she joined the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, an intellectual locus of separatism. Between the first Parti Québécois government and the defeat of the second referendum on sovereignty-association, she published the novel La Québécoite as well as books on minority identity, diasporic writing, Kafka, Yiddish literature, and the failure of socialist realism, for the latter of which she received the 1987 Governor General’s Award. Rather than fearing proximity to the dominant culture of North America, Robin incensed nationalists by urging creative dialogue and cultural crossbreeding (“métissage”). She provocatively wrote in the afterword of the 1993 edition of La Québécoite of “cette grande chance d’être en Amérique, près de l’anglais (on me pardonnera ce sacrilege. La proximité de la langue anglaise est un bonheur pour l’écrivain et non un stigmata, un danger ou une tare)” (221).⁴

The protagonist of La Québécoite, published in 1983 and translated by Phyllis Aronoff as The Wanderer, is a quadruple alter ego whose fraught immigration to Quebec is told in four variations, each time to a different quarter of the city, from immigrant neighbourhoods to tony Outremont, a francophone equivalent to Richler’s abominated Upper Westmount. The novel employs not only pedestrian but also textual flânerie to represent the city’s threatened diversity, such as collagist juxtaposition of voices, styles, media, and languages. This cacophonous and hybrid representation of the city contradicts cherished nationalist notions of “souche” or “pure laine” ethnic purity. Her flâneuse, reminded of Mordecai Richler as she walks the city, inventories effaced English signs banned by the language laws recently legislated by the Parti Québécois, FLQ pamphlets, bilingual menus in delicatessens, and television program listings, the clash of cultural inheritances audible in the names of streets and metro stations. She notes the suicide of Hubert Aquin, and the horror he would have felt at having a university pavilion named in his honour (127). Instead of taking sides on the question nationale she walks the city noting the ideological differences. Conscious of the ethnic divide that permanently bars her assimilation, her anonymous protagonist navigates the alterity thriving in what Robin punningly calls l’entre-dit (143), a potentially illicit or forbidden (interdit) zone between (entre)languages. As laws enforce the use of French by erasing English signage and restricting access to English schools, Robin appeals to this vacancy between the lines as a space for dissent.

Sovereigntist Quebec’s predilection for the heraldry of monarchical and ecclesiastical absolutism disorients Robin no less than Richler, writers who expected the liberal secular society to shatter pre-French Revolutionary idols rather than repurpose them to erase diversity in favour of a monocultural adherence to State-defined valeurs Québécoises. Meanwhile the contradictory basis of such collectivist values is an exclusionary ethnic hierarchy. Sensitive to this shibboleth, her protagonist bitterly acknowledges, “On ne devient pas Québécois” (54).⁵ The emancipatory gusto of the Oui side in the 1980 referendum thus cannot quell her distrust of nationalist nostrums:

La peur de l’homogénéité
de l’unanimité
du Nous excluant tous les autres
du pure laine
elle l’immigrante
la différente
la déviante.
Elle hésiterait. (133)⁶

The division into confessional school boards “Catholic” and “Protestant,” a national holiday celebrated on the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, the establishment of a miniature Academie française to police deviations from the dominant language, the white fleur de lys against blue, the illuminated crucifix on the summit of Mont Royal and behind the Speaker of the House in the Salon bleu of the National Assembly, and all three of these tarnished symbols incorporated into the national flag, are to her jarring petrifications of the Counter-Reformation: “[L]a fleur de lys a pour elle  d’étranges connotations: royalistes, antisémites, nobliaux imbus de leurs anciens privileges” (134). She struggles to reassure herself otherwise: “Elle saurait pourtant que les symboles ont une histoire, qu’ils peuvent inverser leur signification, qu’ils circulent d’étranges façons” (134-35).⁷

To State-imposed cultural uniformity, Robin, responding to the macaronic “patchwork linguistique” of the “Ville schizophréne (82), substitutes the plural voice:

tout juste une voix plurielle,
une voix carrefour,
une voix de l’autre au brisant du texts
la parole immigrante. (167)⁸

Although Richler does not indulge in the heteroglossia of Robin, limiting even the use of Yiddish phrases, his work aligns with this inclusive paradigm of culture and identity. For both writers the Quiet Revolution was an incomplete social democratic project, stalled by a retrogressive construction of ethnic identity and oblivious to the everyday alterity and hybridity of modern Quebec. Robin shares Richler’s commitment to a model of citizenship that does not risk regression to the nativism with which the earlier anti-modern isolationism of L’Action française and L’Action catholique had been tarnished—the xenophobic strain epitomized by the novel L’Appel de la race, published in 1922 under a pseudonym by the former association’s co-founder, Abbé Lionel Groulx.⁹ Richler’s insistence on Groulx’s anti-Semitism was directed at the separatism that venerated his memory, for instance, by naming one of the largest Montreal metro stations in the cleric’s honour.

When Richler exposed the contradictions of an emancipatory political agenda that, under the guise of protection of the dominant language, revived the insularity of the otherwise repudiated Duplessis era, he was by no means without francophone supporters, but Quebec nationalists who shared his liberalism could not denounce Bill 101 with impunity. Part of Richler’s present relevance in Quebec results from Premier François Legault’s nationalist CAQ government’s legislation to enforce restrictive State secularism and extend francisation, promoting conformity to ideologically driven “Quebec values.” Though dead for twenty years, Richler remains the most consequential adversary to nationalist social engineering.

Richler gets situated in opposition to Québécois political self- affirmation at the cost of his allegiance to many of the tenets of the Quiet Revolution. A misapprehension fostered by the ascendency of the Parti Québécois is that the unifying objective of the Révolution tranquille was sovereignty, despite its inception in the 1960 Jean Lesage Liberal government and the defeat even of the qualified referendum proposals for sovereignty-association. In the conventional construction of the reform era, where culture is regarded as an instrument of separatist mobilization, a clarion text such as Gaston Miron’s L’Homme rapaillé¹⁰ is made to obscure the contributions of those who did not equate a pluralist movement for equality, free speech, economic development, and secularized social welfare and education with a project of unilingual statehood. One result of diverting diverse reformist currents into a narrowly indépendantiste channel is to obscure the impact of those whose liberalism conflicted with the perceived exclusionary bias of the independence movement. Once this misconception is removed, Richler’s affinities with his French contemporaries become pronounced, and le cavalier de Saint-Urbain becomes an impassioned Quiet Revolutionary.

Notes

1. “After two centuries of agony, we will burst out in disordered violence, in an uninterrupted series of attacks and shocks, the black fulfilment of a project of total love” (124).
2. “[W]ith my words I place my lips on the burning flesh of my country” (52). “My love, you are my native land” (105). (Williams omits the preceding sentence, which I translate as “I find the bruised and hot earth of our national invention.”)
3. “My story is interrupted, for I do not know the first word of the next episode. But everything will resolve itself in beauty. I have blind faith, even if I know nothing of the next chapter except that it awaits me and will carry me off in a whirlwind” (124).
4. These lines from the afterword translate as follows: “[T]his good fortune of being in America, near the English (one will excuse me this sacrilege. The proximity of the English language is a blessing for the writer and not a stigma, a danger or a taint).”
5. “One doesn’t become Québécois” (39).
6. The fear of homogeneityof unanimity

   of the Us that excludes all others

   of the pure

   She the immigrant

   different

   deviant.

   She would hesitate. (107)

7. “And the fleur de lys has strange connotations for her: royalist, anti-Semitic, a petty nobility imbued with its ancient privilege . . . She would know, however, that symbols have a history, that they can reverse their meanings, that they circulate in strange ways” (109).

8. just barely a plural voice

   a crossroads voice

   a voice of the other where an underwater rock breaks

   the flow of the text

   immigrant words. (137)

9.  See Anctil, Antijudaïsme.
10. Miron writes, for instance, in “L’homme agonique,” “[J]e retrouverai ma nue propriété” (L’Homme 79): “I will have my bare property again” (Embers 17). In “Pour mon repatriement,” he writes, “[U]n jour j’aurai dit ouì à ma naissance” (83): “[O]ne day I’ll have said yes to my birth” (23).

Works Cited

Anctil, Pierre. Antijudaïsme et influence nazie au Québec: le cas du journal. L’Action catholique (1931-1939). PU de Montréal, 2021.

Aquin, Hubert. Prochain épisode. 1965. Introduced and annotated by Gilles Beaudet, Renouveau Pédagogique, 1969.

—. Prochain Episode. Translated by Penny Williams, McClelland and Stewart, 1972.

Auden, W. H. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957. Faber and Faber, 1966.

Borduas, Paul-Emile. Total Refusal. 1948. Translated by Ray Ellenwood, Exile, 1985.

Foran, Charles. Mordecai: The Life and Times. Vintage Canada, 2011.

Godbout, Jacques. Le Couteau sur la table. Boréal, 1989.

Leconte, Marie. “An Ultraminor Literature: English Writing in Montreal.” Translation and the Global City: Bridges and Gateways, edited by Judith Weisz Woodsworth, Routledge, 2022, pp. 62-80.

Miron, Gaston. Embers and Earth: Selected Poems. Translated by D. G. Jones and Marc Plourde, Guernica, 1984.

—. L’Homme rapaillé: poèmes 1953-1975. 1970. L’Hexagone, 2015.

Richler, Mordecai. Introduction. Canadian Writing Today, edited by Richler, Penguin, 1970, pp. 15-23.

—. Joshua Then and Now. McClelland and Stewart, 1980.

Robin, Régine. La Québécoite. 1983. XYZ éditeur, 1993.

—. The Wanderer. Translated by Phyllis Aronoff, Alter Ego, 1997.