Granta - The Magazine of New Writing 141, Autumn 2017 [antikvár]

Introduction C'est fascinant de lire la liste des noms qui auraient pu etre, tantôt tres prosaiques (comme 'Efisga', acronyme de English, French, Irish, Scottish, German, Aboriginal), tantôt lyriques (comme 'Borealia', 'Vesperia', meme 'Ursalia' qui signifie 'Terre des ours'). Une foule d'ursidés traversent d'ailleurs les textes qu'on nous a soumis. Encore aujourd'hui, l'ours regne sur notre imaginaire. Et qui est le théâtre d'entreprises coloniales depuis plus de 480 ans. En mer, sur terre, sous terre, dans le désert, en banlieue, au ciel, prises dans les glaces, tapies dans la foret In 1867, Canada was carefully named a dominion, a designation borrowed from Psalm 72 of the Bible: 'He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the Earth.' From the beginning -the name Canada was born from the Huron-Iroquois word kanata - dominion was linked to the land, languages and lives of Indigenous peoples. The land has sixty unique Indigenous language dialects, and, according to census data, more than two hundred languages reported as a mother tongue or home language. In the country's Northwest Territories, there are eleven official languages, including French, TljchQ and Inuktitut. Canada attained full sovereignty from the British Parliament in 1982, but it is a 150-year-old nation state that has been peopled for at least 14,000 years. When we took on the task of guest-editing this issue of Granta, we opened the call for submissions as widely as we could. Our only parameter: What is being imagined here, now? Within a few weeks, we received over a thousand pieces of prose and poetry in French and English. We read everything. For months we floated at sea, trying to understand what had been gathered.