Collection of shorts stories translated into French
French translation of the Greenlandic book Tarningup ilua. Allallu eqqumiitsullu.
There are so few books translated into French from Greenland that the reader - moreover perhaps already familiar with the works written by foreigners on this country and the spirit filled with images of purity, grandeur, whiteness and of cold they conveyed - will be taken aback by reading this collection of short stories. The reader will feel like entering a world hitherto hidden, far from the grandiose landscapes in which characters get lost in the ice and die of hunger and cold. When the reader closes this book, he, or she, will measure the distance between "the imagined North" and "the imagined Arctic", built for centuries by European and North American cultures, and the urgent and desperate words of this Greenlandic writer about his country, words eaten up by black thoughts, hatred, revolt and deep moral and social distress.
With an introduction and a timeline by Daniel Chartier, director of the International Laboratory of Research on Images of the North, Winter and the Arctic and professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Translation from Danish by Inès Jorgensen and linguistic validation from the original Greenlandic text by Jean-Michel Huctin.
Kelly Berthelsen, Je ferme les yeux pour couvrir l'obscurité, Québec, Presses de l'Université du Québec, «Jardin de givre» series, 2015, 188 p.
ISBN 978-2-7605-4402-4