Madhur Anand discusses the magic of translation in her debut novel To Place a Rabbit
Welcome back to Busy Reading, a monthly column for bookworms and library lovers. Each month, our Associate Editor shares the joy of reading by profiling local writers, exploring emerging genres and compiling book reviews. Don’t forget to check out the Busy Reading Book Club’s monthly pick!
As an ecology professor, Madhur Anand uses systems thinking to demonstrate reciprocal interactions between humans and environmental change. Now, in her debut novel To Place a Rabbit, Anand uses translation as a guide to bridge fact and fiction, memory and reality, science and art.
At the University of Guelph, Anand is a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences and director of the Anand Lab in Global Ecological Change & Sustainability. In 2022, she introduced a new undergraduate course, Creative Writing for Environmental Science, where students are invited to play with storytelling to inspire their approach to scientific thinking.
The course embraces a level of malleability not traditionally found in science. In disciplines with rigid boundaries and methodologies, turning to creative processes can spark innovation, expand thinking and improve communication of scientific knowledge.
It’s exactly this transformative potential that brought Anand to creative writing in the first place.
In the final year of her PhD in plant/environmental science, Anand remembers feeling a “scientist block,” which would lead her to “accidentally discovering [she] was a poet.”
“I just couldn’t continue with science, and something was missing, I guess,” Anand said. “Something was just in the way.”
Anand walked to the window in her office, and as she looked out over the Western university campus, reveling in a view not unlike the one we presently enjoyed—sitting in front of Massey Hall looking onto Johnston Green—something clicked: “I came back to my desk and I wrote my first poem.”
Anand published her debut poetry collection, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, decades later, in 2015. Her experimental memoir, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, won the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. It’s a two-part work that first tells of her parents’ experience of Partition in India and later of their lives in Canada; then tells the story as she had digested it, as the daughter of immigrants. Then, in 2022, Anand published her second poetry collection, Parasitic Oscillations.
Unifying all three works is her unique narration of human experience: of science and art, nature and nurture, and the rifts and bridges between them. It is no surprise that she would explore the same themes in fiction, but from a novel perspective; the process of translation, something she had never attempted before.
“I often embark on things in my writing where I know nothing about it, but I still am attracted to it,” Anand said.
At the center of To Place a Rabbit are a scientist and a novelist who meet at a literary festival. The novelist has written a novella in English, had it translated and published in French, which she cannot read, and subsequently misplaced the English manuscript. Upon hearing this, the scientist—who is fluent in French and has secretly always wanted to write fiction—offers to translate the work back to English. As she completes the translation, the scientist is haunted by memories of a French lover, and her life experiences bleed into her task, ultimately transfiguring her version from the original.
It’s impossible to ignore the autobiographical elements of Anand’s novel, considering she was inspired to write the novel during an identical translation task of her own. Upon meeting Lisa Moore, a Canadian novelist, at a literary festival in 2022, Anand learned that Moore had written a novella, had it translated into French, and never published the English version.
“That just kind of completely captured me as an idea,” Anand said. “It just seized something inside me.”
Translations are never exact replicas, they are interpretations. Each translator leaves a distinct fingerprint on a text. Consider Homer’s The Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic with over 60 English translations. While some translations of The Odyssey are more faithful to the original Greek, others make modifications to accentuate the epiels poetic style or to make the story simpler for modern readers to understand. These translatory choices are reflective of the individual translator and the cultural context surrounding them.
For Anand and Moore, the novella translation was akin to a long-winded game of telephone. As Anand worked, the translation mutated into fiction. To Place a Rabbit is such a manifestation of Anand’s psyche that the novel begins not with a prologue, but an abstract.
“I felt like I truly could find freedom and liberty to take something from another language, another person’s story, really, and another person’s fiction, and make it my own,” Anand said, “which is sort of a bit of a metaphor and an analogy for what I feel fiction does, more generally.”
Translation is the common thread in Anand’s double life as a scientist and writer. She understands human-environment relationships to be “two-way couplings”: human activity creates environmental change, which in turn alters human behaviour, creating cascading effects through time. That constant interaction and feedback is itself a kind of translation.
Art is a translatory tool that makes science intelligible. It also helps people digest negative feelings associated with climate change. Anand believes students are drawn to her creative writing course because it can be an outlet to process and communicate their emotions about the environment.
She hopes her work can help people recognize that science and art are not so disparate—they’re two disciplines that require more communication with each other.
“I think the artistic way of living and working,” said Anand, “can really help our society in terms of dealing with all of the changes and adaptations we need to make.”
Busy Reading Book Club: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver
Welcome back to the Busy Reading Book Club! Featuring monthly reads with an emphasis on diverse voices and thoughtful stories, we hope to connect with fellow readers to share the joy of great books.
Our November read is Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. This collection of more than 200 poems spans over five decades of Oliver’s luminous, Pulitzer Prize-winning career. Published in 2017, Devotions was compiled by Oliver herself, before her death two years later. The remarkable works within are an enduring reminder of our world’s interconnectedness.
Oliver’s poetry is rooted in the natural world, but she writes from a distinctly human perspective; one of amazement at the kinship and understanding that can exist between beings. Nature is edifying, and Oliver recognized the rarity of it all, in the lessons humans can forage beneath the trees in the woods.
Devotions is not only an opportunity to peruse the career-defining works of one of America’s greatest poets. It encourages readers to find new appreciation for the ground sighing under our feet as we move through the world.
Tell us if you’re reading along by emailing ae@theontarion.com, or stay tuned via Instagram, @ontarionupdates, for updates on our monthly meetings.