Nicole Brossard's Le Dos indocile des mots / The Backtalking Back of Words, translated by Karen McPherson, will be released September 15 by The Transformation Review Press / Les Éditions de la Revue de Transformation. Six months ago the press didn't exist, The Transformation Review journal had just gone live, and its mandate was limited to reviews of and essays on poetry in translation. So how did we get here?

Here's the short version. We started a journal. Sara's friend Karen sent us an introduction she had written to her translation of a long poetic sequence. We were excited. We decided to publish the intro. We decided to publish the whole sequence online. We decided to have it printed and have an ebook too. The book was in hand mid-August. It's on sale everywhere September 15.

Here's the very long version. Sara Burant and I were doing late-life MFAs at Saint Mary's College of California in 2016, and our professor, Matthew Zapruder, had us study a translation of Paul Éluard's "La Terre est bleue comme une orange." Eighteen months later we were in Paris, walking through Père Lachaise cemetery, and spotted Éluard's grave. Sara suggested we come back the next day; she would bring a small orange and a slip of paper with a line from the poem to place on the gravestone. We did, and sent a photo to Matthew, who told us he thought Éluard might have been one of the most interesting men who ever lived.

Fast forward two years to March 2020. The world shuts down. Sara is in Eugene, Oregon, and I am in Hamilton, Ontario, having rushed home from Oregon when the Prime Minister of Canada said to get home while I could. That's another story. But Sara and I decide to start a collaborative translation of Éluard. We pick La Vie immédiate more or less at random, because AbeBooks had copies for both of us.

Fast forward four years. We have finished collaboratively translating the complete collection, working both remotely and together in person, and translations from it have been published widely. We start submitting the manuscript to the limited number of publishers of literary poetry in translation. World Poetry Books is one of them. They reach out and ask if we'd like to review upcoming books. We would. They send advance reader copies, and I write a review of Liesl Ujvary’s Good & Safe translated by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie. I send it out. It seems to take forever even to hear a rejection, if I hear anything at all.

I think: this is not right. These books deserve notice when they come out, not on a general literary journal's slow response scale. I talk it over with Sara and she agrees. We decide to start a journal, The Transformation Review, with the two of us as co-editors. I begin building it in late November. I find public-domain essays on key concepts in translating poetry from luminaries such as Matthew Arnold on translating Homer, John Dryden on translating Ovid and T.S. Eliot on translating Euripides, so we have seminal material at launch alongside my Ujvary review. We also provide PDFs so people can print and read the articles offline.

We launch on March 7 with an always-open call for submissions and an intention to tell writers quickly whether we're accepting their work, and to publish in a timely fashion. We limit ourselves to reviews of poetry books in translation and essays on poetry in translation, partly out of concern for how hard it is to get the formatting right online for poems that use white space and typographic variation.

We get a lot of encouragement from people we know in the poetry and translation communities. One of them is Maxine Scates, a well-known poet and mentor in Eugene. Maxine mentions to Sara that a mutual friend, Karen McPherson, has an essay on translating Nicole Brossard and might be looking for a publisher for it. Karen is a poet and translator and professor emerita of French literature at the University of Oregon, and has published translations of Québécois writers including Louise Warren and Louise Dupré. Sara contacts Karen, who sends us the introduction she has written to Le Dos indocile des mots, an abecedarian from Nicole Brossard's 2007 collection Après les mots.

It offers a personal story around the translation and key insights into translation itself. Karen also sends us the 26-page poetic sequence and her 26-page translation. The essay is excellent, but we are floored by what Karen has done with the poem. An abecedarian is a sequence with each section built around a letter of the alphabet, and Karen has managed to retain the sound, the feel and the impact in moving from French to English while preserving the abecedarian form. Sara suggests we figure out how to publish an excerpt with the introduction. I think about it and say we should publish the whole thing, even though the site was never set up for that.

Nicole hasn't just built an experience in words; she uses typography for effect. Mid-line changes in font size and colour, for example. The letter X is rendered as a square of x's and words. Two weeks later we have a prototype to show Karen before I head back to Ontario. Each poem sits on its own page with a toggle to view it in English, French or both. There are still challenges with the typography, but we are all feeling pretty good about this. We all agree to move forward and once the bugs are worked out Karen will contact Nicole for her endorsement.

Over the following months I work out the typography, and we add a table of contents for the online book that looks like an address-book index. Karen contacts Nicole, who is very encouraging about the whole project and suggests a concept for the cover.

I come to realize that since we know how to get this into a PDF or EPUB, the book deserves a shot at wider distribution. So, we begin the project of making it available through print-on-demand and ebook via IngramSpark, an aggregator that gives libraries and retailers worldwide access. Somewhere in here I realize we've gone from a journal to a press, with me as publisher in Hamilton and Sara and me as co-editors.

The press applies for and receives ISBNs from Library and Archives Canada. We license the rights to the French from Les Écrits des Forges, publisher of the original. I consult with Noelle Allen at Wolsak and Wynn, who published my last poetry collection, and she tells me about Rapido Books in Montreal, who will do short runs, as few as 24 copies.

I think the press should do a high-quality run of 30: ten for Nicole, ten for Karen, and ten split between Sara and me. I work with Rapido and they produce a proof. I get the proof and fall in love with it. The book is beautiful. I order 200 copies instead. And rather than leave everything to IngramSpark, Sara and I are now also selling direct. Sara has copies for US distribution and reviews, and I have copies here.

So on September 15 the book becomes available through every outlet Ingram distributes to. The high-quality, printed-in-Canada edition is available direct from the press right now.

That's how we got here.

Karen's introduction, with two of the poems excerpted, follows. Please take a look.