Emma Roy

Emma Roy will translate Le danseur de La Macaza by Anne-Élaine Cliche from Quebec French.

Emma Roy is a queer emerging translator and writer living on the unceded indigenous lands of Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She currently translates from French, but plans to work from Spanish, her second language, in the future as well.

Emma was born by the ocean on Canada’s west coast and grew up in a small prairie city by a sandy green river. Her first experience with literary translation was in 2015, when she moved to Montreal and began learning French. She picked up a French-Spanish copy of Neruda’s sonnets, and decided to practice her French by translating one of the poems (Matilde, name of plant or stone or wine…). The experience was a bit of a revelation—the intimacy of inhabiting the words, the delicious and unsolvable puzzle of trying to bring them into English, was captivating. The poem came alive in a completely new way. She was immediately hooked.

In the spring of 2021, Emma graduated with a BA in Translation and Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal. As part of her studies, she translated a collection of poetry by Franco-Ontarian Chloé LaDuchesse, Furies, as well as poetry by Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. She was twice named a finalist for the school’s Irving Layton Award for Creative Writing, and upon graduation received the Prix de Paul Hollander, awarded to the top graduating student in the Études françaises department. Although Emma’s degree was focused primarily on technical translation, she worked hard to bend it towards her passions for literary work, including replacing a discontinued course with a Masters-level literary translation class. In 2020, Emma also participated in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s online Summer School intensive.

Since graduating, Emma has translated articles, essays and a short story for Tenou’a – Atelier de pensée(s) Juive(s), and also recently translated three children’s books for self-published French author Emma Paidge.

Emma’s mentorship project will be her first full-length work. She feels honoured to be working with mentor Linda Gaboriau to translate Québec author Anne-Élaine Cliche’s Le danseur de La Macaza, which is a breathless dive into memory, fantasy, rumour, and myth. Written in a headlong, stream-of-consciousness narration, with page-long sentences, brimming with tangents, repetitions, and minute detail, the novel promises to be a fascinating challenge to translate. She is grateful to ALTA organizers, and to Linda, for this opportunity.

In her spare time, Emma and her wife organize a cooperative woodworking shop in Pointe-Saint-Charles, a neighbourhood of Montreal that lies between train tracks, a glass factory, and the banks of the St Lawrence. Emma is a mother to a two and a half year old, who more often than not is pretending to be a cat named Thermometer; as well as to a ten-year-old dog named Zephyr, who is, in fact, a dog.

Image description:

Emma, a white woman with shoulder-length dark hair, sits at her desk and smiles at the camera, her chin in her hand. She wears a white collared shirt with tiny black polkadots and short sleeves.