René Char

The work of René Char is missing from the NB public library system.

Why should this matter?  Well, there are bilingual editions available (quality varies) and perhaps he is important for Acadiens given their Quebec neighbours: consider what he says in Feuillets d'Hypnos about the French staff officer who laments the language spoken by Char's courageous maquisards.

He is not a Parisian poet so much as a poet of Provence.  Yes, I know, Aix is a favourite destination of the Quebec intellectual.  But all the same ...

Two nights ago I went to meet an Anglo-Irish poet at Alden Nowlan House at unb.ca.  One table in the Windsor Castle bar was speaking French during the hockey game. A woman stepped out onto the deck and said "Look, I can speak French, too" and began making noises.  It could have been a Russian imitating a Pole or a Ukrainian.

I keep hearing this kind of offensive drivel and noise-making here and there around this officially bilingual town - and in this, Canada's only bilingual province.  And when will I hear an Acadienne imitate an NB anglo here in "Arcadia"? Will it be among Australian graduate students at UNB?  I think not.

Is the answer to require Canadian schools to teach that Norman French forms a large part of our English vocabulary - and that the largest part of that came from Latin Rome?  That the French were Franks? ( Is Germanic ancestry still the dominant ethnic origin of "English" Canadians? Does it remain so for "whites" in the USA?)  Or are we to concede to ethnic loathing?

Should foreign students be required to take at least one course on Canadian history to obtain a graduate degree from one of our universities?  Is UNB finding and funding graduate candidates from "la Francophonie" as much as from the Commonwealth?

As to the absence of Char: I have noted elsewhere how deficient the New Directions bilingual edition of Char is -  but better that than nothing.

And here in Fredericton, where is the monument or plaque to commemorate the burning of those Acadian homes on these fashionable streets? (Shades of another quiet university town filled with tourists in summer: Marburg in Lahntal.)  The Marburg of the students Eliot and Pasternak.