Sponsor(s): Mary C. Stoddard Fund, Department of History of Art, Canadian Studies, English

Critic, translator, poet, essayist, Édouard Roditi (1910-1992) was a singular witness to the twentieth century. Roditi was born in Paris and had Sephardic ancestors of Greek, Spanish, and Italian origins on his father’s side and Catholic and Ashkenazi Jewish connections on his mother’s. A published surrealist poet by eighteen, Roditi would become an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, a highly regarded literary translator, a contributor to many LGBTQ publications from Arcadie to Gay Sunshine, and a perceptive social analyst whose outspoken views irritated American, Soviet, and French authorities by turns. From his family history and childhood to Berlin in the immediate post-war years, French decolonization, and essays on writers such as André Breton, Hart Crane, Italo Svevo, and Maurice Sachs, Roditi’s writings over six decades are a unique account of a life lived at the flashpoints of history and at the margins of society, providing acute and unsparing observations of literature and political events.
 

Robert Schwartzwald is a Professor in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal. His publications address interfaces between notions of national, cultural, and literary modernity, often with special attention to issues sexual representation. He is the translator into English of Daniel Guérin’s The Brown Plague : Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany, a monograph on Jean-Marc Vallée’s film C.R.A.Z.Y. for the Queer Film Classics series, and studies of queer Québec literature, theatre, and cinema. He has also published on French-Quebec relations during the Vichy years, intercultural relations between Quebec’s Jewish communities and French-Canadians, and the impact of French anticolonial writings on modern Quebec nationalism. He is the receipient of the Governor-General’s International Award for Canadian Studies.

Sherry Simon is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Concordia University, Montreal. She has published widely in the areas of intercultural and translation studies, in particular exploring the cultural history of linguistically divided cities. Among her recent publications are Translation Sites. A Field Guide and Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. Her books have been translated into French, Polish, Turkish, and most recently Gender in Translation was published in France as Le genre en traduction, trad. Corinne Oster, Presses Artois. She has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture (with K. Mezei and L. von Flotow), (2014). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec.

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