bridge

							Bridge & Overpass
in a City




      -- “Bridge to Babel: The
      Cosmopolitan City”
      -- 〈天橋不見了〉
Outline
• Starting Questions & General
  Discussion
• Sherry Simon Translating Montreal
• The Skywalk in Gone
WHY BRIDGES?
WHAT BRIDGES HAVE WE READ/SEEN
SO FAR IN OUR TEXTS?
           Bridge, viaduct, overpass …
     The Image of the City
• A city is comprehended in terms of its
  five elements:
  paths  bridge
  landmarks  bridge
  edges  bridge
  districts
  nodes (hub or center of activity) –
  under a bridge (e.g. 光華商場)
The Bridges we’ve read about…
  1. In the Skin of a Lion:
  Bloor Street Viaduct-past
                              1. A city’s infrastructure, part
                   (source)
                                 of urban planner’s vision
                                 and dream, can be
                                 dangerous
     2. Le Confessionnal:
                              2. The present on the
   Québec bridge (source)        shoulders of the past
         3. Rispondetemi:
                              3. A site of danger, reversal of
   Jacques Cartier Bridge        traditional perspective.
                 (source)
The Bridges we’ve read about…
                       1. In the Skin of a Lion:
                       Bloor Street Viaduct-past
                                        (source)
                   Bloor Street Viaduct- present
                                        (source)
                            3. Le Confessionnal:
                        Québec bridge (source)
                                4. Rispondetemi:
                         Jacques Cartier Bridge
                                        (source)
The Bridges we’ve seen in
Taipei
                             Map (source)

                          1. 台北橋 (source)
                       2. 新北大橋 (source)

                        3. 大直橋 (source)
                        4. 彩虹橋(source)
Bridge: Typical Meanings
• Literally, a structure built to span a
  valley, road, body of water, or other
  physical obstacle such as a canyon,
  for the purpose of providing passage
  over the obstacle.
• A bridge connects two places, two
  cultures, offers a space of transition
  and translation.
Translating
Montreal




Sherry Simon
Sherry Simon
• Translating Montreal:
  Episodes in the Life of
  a Divided City -- won
  the Quebec Writer’s
  Federation’s annual
  awards
• Translating Montreal –
  from a divided city to
  a cosmopolitan one
• Father, a doctor;
  mother, a painter
                            Sherry Simon with her mother, artist
                            Shirley Berk Simon. (source)
“Bridge to Babel: The Cosmopolitan
City”
main theme: bridge (or translation and immigration)
   is more than an arrow of passage (164)
1. General meanings of bridges
2. Bridge of Madness (e.g. “Rispontedemi” “Une
   nuit, un taxi”)  stories
3. Extreme cosmopolitanism
4. The Bridge, according to G. Roy
5. Cultural Restlessness  stories
6. Migrant Words: from metissage to power relations
  – the impossibilities of translation (ref. Simon Harel)
General meanings of
Bridge and
Translation
Bogdan Khmelnitsky pedestrian bridge
                                   (image source)




A passage way enclosed in a in a glass
  canopy built over the
steel arch of of Nicholas II Bridge
Bogdan Khmelnitsky pedestrian bridge
                                    (image source)




(163) Bridges: no longer spaces of
  transit, but also places of refuge,
  places of commerce, architectural
  feats or monuments.
 Also of suicide
The Old Bridge in Mostar
• A city divided between
  Croat and Bosniak
  ethnic communities
• (164) Bosnian, Serbian,
  and Croatian separate
  codes
Bridge – to connect and translate

• “What happens on the bridge must
  be taken into account. The trajectory
  is as meaningful as the goal.”
• In Montreal: communication of
  different modes.
  – In the past, ‘the Main’ is the main place
    for crossings,
  – Now it extends across St. Laurence
    River to the suburbs and hinterlands of
    the city.
Bridge: Its Ambiguous Nature
• Michel de Certeau: “It alternately
  welds together and opposes
  insularities” (174)
•  a city: a city of communities vs. a
  cosmopolitan city where differences
  are dissolved in an atomized diversity
  (176)
Extreme cosmopolitanism
1. Alan Medam: two dynamics– “That they
   contain the world, that the world comes to live
   within them” (168)
2. Diasporic city: with both centripetal and
   centrifugal forces
3. “Babel-effect” (Durovicova 2003) the extreme
   linguistic heterogeneity of diasporic migration.
   The metropolitan swirl of languages provokes
   sensations of both euphoria and anxiety.
   – “seductive form of totality”
   – “impotent anger of incomprehension” (177)
Extreme cosmopolitanism
3. e.g. cities in with ethnic conflicts: Cochin
4. e.g. “an identity that involves a consciousness
   of others—a telescoping of the other as an
   inalienable part of the self.”
--the other: exiled, stranger, friendly ghost
  Polyphony vs. Translation and
  Translation in language
1. P. 184 Indirect translation, “writing
   as translation,” “cultural translation”
2. Translation:
   – In UK and US, the annual production of
     translation is limited to 3.5 to 4 per cent of
     total production –with a focus on a few well-
     known writers
   – In China?
   – In Taiwan?
3. Migrant Words – (p. 186) Impossibility
  in translation – not for technical reasons but as
  a result of a lack of political will. (e.g. “the
  disappeared” –the absence of Twin Towers,
  the absence of favelas [shanty town] from the
  city maps of Brazil)
  The Bridge Stories (1)
• Bridge: Emile Olliver – a city gone mad with difference: Lafaldio
  p. 167
• In-bewteener: Jacques Ferron – “Le Pont” (the Anglaise) & La
  Nuit (Alfred Carone, a magical passeur with an Italian name) p.
  170
• Translation: Marco Micone – with a goal of promoting immigrant
  culture in Quebec; the first writer to put immigrants on the stage.
  Gens du silence (1982) p. 182 the book’s translation: from
  French to Italian and then to French (with the Italian characters
  speaking “like Francophone”)
• Translation: Abla Farhoud Le bonheur a la queue glissante
  (1998) – illiterate narrator/character, her story told in halting
  French.
• -- the novel ends with a list of proverbs in Arabic and French(p.
  183)
Bridge Stories (2): Cultural
Restlessness
• Immigrant writers (180) and the street
  of Montreal
• Régine Robin La Québécoite –(p. 181)
  reflects the newcomer’s incapacity to
  decipher the cultural script of the new
  place, to integrate the disordered
  surfaces of the city into a new order.
•  sometimes literally polyphonic,
  sometimes with imaginative experience
  of other languages
The Bridge Stories: Gabrielle Roy

1. The only Canadian writer who “belongs” to
   both English and French traditions. (178)
2. The Tin Flute – thought to be written in
   English
3. In between two languages, she was in her
   late 20s when she decided on French as her
   literary language.
4. External factors: her own efforts in
   constructing her public persona (as a
   federalist), the political strife in the 60’s
5. Her empathy with outsiders, migrants,
   wanderers and exiles
 The Bridge Stories: Gabrielle Roy

Gabrielle Roy
–in Montreal 1939 (documentary by Lea Pool
   opening, 8:00 freedom; 28:00— 31:00 Saint
   Henri
The Tin Flute (p. 175-)
-- a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its
    struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its
    search for love.
-- regarded as the novel that helped lay the foundation for
    Quebec's Quiet Revolution of the 1960s (source)
Alexandre Chenevert (1954) (p. 175-76),
 -- a dark and emotional story that is ranked as one of the
    most significant works of psychological realism in the
    history of Canadian literature. (source)
Writers about immigration
Dany Laferrière (Haitian Canadian)
-- How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting
   Tired
• -- Heading South (南方失樂園)
-- L‘énigme du retour--返鄉之謎 2009麥迪西文學獎
   得主)
-- Un Homme dans sa ville 9:56 –13:
〈天橋不見了〉
《你那邊幾點》(2001)〈天橋不見了〉(2003)
 • 小康 sells watches on the        • 陳, back from France, finds
   skywalk, and then gets curious   the skywalk gone, so she
   about 陳, who buys a watch        then starts to search for 小
   and then goes to France.         康 in a crowd without
                                      success.

                                   • Reconstructions 
                                   • Spatial disorientation




 • Flows of people 
 • Temporal disorientation
  Other Self-Reflexive Elements
A. Stories of the same characters:
  –   小康 grows older
  –   小康、湘琪 (also in 《河流》《你那邊
      幾點》)
  –   陸奕靜 as mother who gets younger
      and is on the loose?
B. Major scenes of change in Taipei
  –   《青少年哪吒》(1992)-- Xi-men Ding 西
      門町
  –    (愛情萬歲) (1994)– Da-An park 大安公
      園
  –   〈天橋不見了〉-- Taipei railroad
      station 台北火車站
Q: What does the opening scene mean?
1. build a team of 8 members, …your
  mission is to lead your team to fight
  against wicked demons …
2. At Family Mart, buy chips and get
  Lipton Tea for free.
Possible Answers:
What does the opening mean?
A: 1. Surrounded by virtual and
  commercial spaces  heterotopia
  (spaces with multiple entrances and
  exits)
2. Mirror images
 Questions
• What are the implications of
  – Chen’s sense of disorientation
    when not seeing the bridge?
  – the two women’s jay-walking?
  – the coffee shop’s not serving
    coffee
 Answers
• What are the implications of
  – the two women’s jay-walking:
    disorientation over the loss of
    familiar and beaten paths 
    disorder
  – the coffee shop’s not serving
    coffee: loss of the familiar
    functions
Questions
• What are the implications of
  – 陳’s loss of ID card
Answers
 – 陳’s loss of ID card:
 She starts with searching
   for the skywalk,
   searching for 小康
 Then it is her own ID card
   that she’s lost.
 Answers
• the two women’s jay-walking 
• the coffee shop’s not serving
  coffee  loss of familiar
  functions
• 陳’s loss of ID card loss of
  identity in the crowd
Questions
• What are the implications of
  – 小康 in a public bathroom 
    not at home
  – always framed—by the walls
    or windows
  – Utilized in adult film, he is
    asked to take off his clothes,
    performs sex act (lack of
    privacy), and put on
    somebody else’s uniform.
Chance Encounters in the City
• Not missed at 《河流》,
• In 《你那邊》《天橋》missed at the
  end of the film
The Ending
• 葛蘭〈南屏晚鐘〉:我匆匆地走入森林中，森林它一
  重重；我找不到他的行蹤，只聽到那樹搖風
• 1. from Skywalk to sky; 2.  《天邊一朵雲》(2004)