Bridge & Overpass in a City

1. Bridge & Overpassin a City -- “Bridge to Babel: The Cosmopolitan City” -- 〈天橋不見了〉

2. Outline • Starting Questions & General Discussion • Sherry Simon Translating Montreal • The Skywalk in Gone

3. WHY BRIDGES? WHAT BRIDGES HAVE WE READ/SEEN SO FAR IN OUR TEXTS? Bridge, viaduct, overpass …

4. 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)

5. The Bridges we’ve read about… • In the Skin of a Lion: Bloor Street Viaduct-past (source) 2. Le Confessionnal: Québec bridge (source) 3. Rispondetemi: Jacques Cartier Bridge (source) 1. A city’s infrastructure, part of urban planner’s vision and dream, can be dangerous 2. The present on the shoulders of the past 3. A site of danger, reversal of traditional perspective.

6. The Bridges we’ve read about… • 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)

7. 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)

8. 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.

9. Translating Montreal Sherry Simon

10. 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 Sherry Simon with her mother, artist Shirley Berk Simon. (source)

11. “Bridge to Babel: The Cosmopolitan City” main theme: bridge (or translation and immigration) is more than an arrow of passage (164) • General meanings of bridges • Bridge of Madness (e.g. “Rispontedemi” “Une nuit, un taxi”)  stories • Extreme cosmopolitanism • The Bridge, according to G. Roy • Cultural Restlessness  stories • Migrant Words: from metissage to power relations – the impossibilities of translation (ref. Simon Harel)

12. General meanings of Bridge and Translation

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

14. Bogdan Khmelnitskypedestrian 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

15. The Old Bridge in Mostar • A city divided between Croat and Bosniak ethnic communities • (164) Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian separate codes

16. 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.

17. 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)

18. 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)

19. 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

20. 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)

21. 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 FarhoudLe 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)

22. 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

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

24. 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)

25. 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:

26. 〈天橋不見了〉 Loss of the Familiar  Loss of Identity???

27. 《你那邊幾點》(2001)〈天橋不見了〉(2003) • 小康 sells watches on the skywalk, and then gets curious about 陳, who buys a watch and then goes to France. • Flows of people  • Temporal disorientation • 陳,back from France, finds the skywalk gone, so she then starts to search for 小康 in a crowd without success. • Reconstructions  • Spatial disorientation

28. Other Self-Reflexive Elements • 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? • 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 • The same apartment in many films

29. 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.

30. 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

31. 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

32. 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

33. Questions • What are the implications of • 陳’s loss of ID card

34. 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.

35. 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

36. 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.

37. Chance Encounters in the City • Not missed at 《河流》, • In 《你那邊》《天橋》missed at the end of the film

38. 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)