Questions of Status

Abstract

This article compares two translations of ‘Macbeth’, one into Québécois by Michel Garneau, the other into Lowland Scots by R.L.C. Lorimer. Recent analysis of these outstanding examples of ‘minority’ translation practice has tended to overlook the critical after-life that has contributed to the classic status of ‘The Scottish Play’. The article asks whether this matters and uses insights first developed by New Historicist critics to revise and nuance Annie Brisset’s powerful critique of the ethnocentrism of the Garneau translation, suggesting that the banished figure of the ‘Foreign’ in fact returns through the material signs of its erasure. R.L.C. Lorimer’s ‘restoration’ of the figure of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the royal line halucinated by Macbeth works in a similar way, giving rise to the argument that historicizing vernaculars, provided they are used in an ironic, self-conscious manner by translators, can create dramatic texts that speak to and about the complex cultural and linguistic histories and realities of aspiring nation states and the central role played by translation itself in this context. Such translations further complicate Venuti’s distinction between foreignizing and domesticating translation strategies.