Portfolio
Like a Hurricane
Jonathan Bécotte
Orca Book Publishers
🏆 Starred reviews in Quill and Quire and School Library Journal
A young teen’s secret is tearing him apart. He is afraid to share his secret with his parents or his friends. What if they reject him? And what can he do with the feelings he has for his childhood friend when he knows his friend does not feel the same way? The turmoil continues to rise with the force of a hurricane─total destruction seems almost certain.
Told in beautiful, evocative prose with its unique design,
Like a Hurricane is a visually stunning exploration of what it means to be true to one’s self.
“Jonathan is attentive to detail and wants to make sure his translation is accurate. We were in touch on several occasions and discussed certain passages in the text. He wanted to ensure he understood all the subtlety of the images. He is open, flexible and sensitive. I’m so happy it was he who transformed my ouragan into a hurricane.”
— Jonathan Bécotte
YOURCENAR: UNE ÎLE DES PASSIONS (SURTITLES)
Hélène Dorion and Marie-Claire Blais
Performed by the Opéra de Montréal and Festival de l’Opéra de Québec (summer 2022)
Inspired by the life and work of Marguerite Yourcenar, this Quebec creation by librettist Hélène Dorion and the late Marie-Claire Blais is set to music by composer Éric Champagne. Focused mainly on her relationships with Grace Frick and Jerry Wilson, the opera highlights the tensions that shaped Marguerite Yourcenar’s life as a woman, companion, and writer.
Marguerite Yourcenar was a novelist who strongly impacted the literary world of the 20th century. She was torn between the discipline which writing demanded and her thirst for freedom, between the stability of emotional balance and her own passionate nature.
“When I requested Jonathan Kaplansky to translate the libretto of the opera Yourcenar – Une île de passions / Yourcenar – An Island of Passions that I wrote with Marie-Claire Blais for the projected surtitles in English, I knew it would be delicate work. The text was written to be sung, so the rhythm, sonority and musicality of the words had to be felt when spectators read it onscreen during performances. Jonathan met the challenge brilliantly.”
— Hélène Dorion
ETHNOPSYCHIATRY
Henri Ellenberger; critical edition by Emmanuel Delille, winner of the Prix Paul Vigné d’Octon of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 2022
McGill-Queen’s University Press
What is the relationship between culture and mental health? Is mental illness universal? Are symptoms of mental disorders different across social groups? In the late 1960s these questions gave rise to a groundbreaking series of articles written by the psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger, who would go on to publish The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry in 1970. Fifty years later they are presented for the first time in English translation, introduced by historian of science Emmanuel Delille.
These original essays, and their masterful contextualization, provide a compelling introduction to the foundations of transcultural psychiatry and one of its most distinguished and prolific researchers.
“Working with Jonathan Kaplansky has been a wonderful professional experience. I entrusted him with the translation of my first book published in North America. Our regular discussions on either side of the Atlantic rapidly evolved into a friendly dialogue and I always contact Jonathan when I come to Montreal and look forward to seeing him in person. Attentive to detail as well as to the narrative flow, even in highly technical academic texts, he is able to quickly establish a relationship of trust with authors. I always call on him whenever I need a translator. His achievements in the area of fiction, especially in North American French-language literature, have also led me to stay abreast of his new translations and favourite authors. I heartily recommend his translation services.”
— Emmanuel Delille
Raymond Brousseau and Inuit Art: The Remarkable Journey of an Artist and Collector
John Porter
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Varia
This vivid, in-depth biography describes the remarkable journey of Raymond Brousseau, an unconventional artist and collector whose discovery of Inuit art was a revelatory experience that guided his life’s work, leading to the creation of the Brousseau Inuit Art Collection recently presented to the Musée national des beaux-arts in Quebec City. Evoking all the beauty and diversity of the cultures of the North, John R. Porter captures the truly free spirit of a pioneer in his field.
Co-edition with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
“My collaboration with Jonathan Kaplansky was both pleasant and efficient. His translation of my manuscript with its sometimes specialized vocabulary was impeccable and fulfilled my expectations. I cannot thank him enough.” — John Porter
Fugitives
Lise Gauvin, winner of the Grand Prix de la Francophonie (Médaille de vermeil) of the Académie Française, 2020
Ekstasis Editions
We live in a world of sensations and cursory thought, of appearances, clichés and empty gestures designed to make everything seem lighter, including love, suffering, and even death. What hopes and true desires can remain through the sequence of fleeting images and scenes that make up our existence? The twenty stories gathered here portray an eminently contemporary world of meetings, travel, work, and intimacy, both sweet and intense, a world that reveals and conceals the fundamental issues of life. Written in language that is both subtle and nuanced, in a tone that balances irony and compassion, the stories are notable for their apt observation, lively dialogue and complete trust in the reader’s intelligence and sensitivity. In
Fugitives, Lise Gauvin is revealed as a brilliant and original short story writer. Jonathan Kaplansky’s translation of her work is both faithful and lyrical.
“Jonathan Kaplansky is a highly competent translator, attentive to the nuances of a text and sensitive to the sounds and poetic effects of words. Furthermore, he is a pleasure to work with.”
— Lise Gauvin
Things Seen
Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature
University of Nebraska Press
🏆 French Voices Award
In this “journal” Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where “things seen” reflect a private life meeting the larger world. From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.
“I deeply appreciated Jonathan Kaplansky’s translation of my book
La vie extérieure / Things Seen, a journal of things seen in streets, stores and on public transportation. He conveyed with precision and sensitivity what I wanted to show of today’s world and wanted readers to experience.”
— Annie Ernaux
Wednesday Night at the End of the World
Hélène Rioux
Cormorant Books
🏆 Longlisted for the ReLit Award
The Winter Solstice. A diner in Montreal. A movie. A photograph. A name. What may seem like floating bits of trivia are actually the anchor points of our lives, the details that tell us who we are and where we are going. They are the air we breathe, shared between strangers without a second thought. They are the avenues through which humanity flows. Hélène Rioux's collection of interconnected stories about cab drivers and dancers, painters and writers, Russians and Mexicans, and fathers and daughters, portrays our world the way Escher would a staircase: intricate, troubling, fantastic, and always surprising.
“Wednesday Night at the End of the World, or
Mercredi soir au Bout du monde. There isn’t one story, but a new story in each chapter. There isn’t one place, but a new place each time, in Canada, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Bulgaria. The language varies according to the characters, at times vernacular, at times bombastic or poetic. And these characters in turn are young or almost a hundred years old, disillusioned or passionate . . . So many translation difficulties that Jonathan Kaplansky overcame brilliantly!” — Hélène Rioux
Days of Sand
Hélène Dorion, recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award and the Prix Athanase David
Cormorant Books
Remarkable images, thoughts, and memories come together, fusing autobiography, sensory fiction, and poetic prose in this beautiful novel by acclaimed Québécoise poet, Hélène Dorion. Touching on her time in hospital as a child, vacations spent along the St. Lawrence and the coast of Maine, family stories and histories, Dorion takes the reader into her intimately recorded emotions and carefully observed daily existence. An intimate study of the power of words and language, body and self,
Days of Sand is a meditation that resonates with the stories of a life not merely lived, but experienced in a child's growing awareness of the greater world.
“Jonathan Kaplansky has translated some of my poetry, as well as my first novel, Jours de sable / Days of Sand. I enjoyed our collaboration. Jonathan is open to dialogue with the author, which contributed greatly to the precision of the translation. He entered my literary universe with rigour and sensitivity, recreating the colours, the flow of expression and the complexity of the characters. Jonathan knows how to respect the integrity of the text while giving it the autonomy required for it to exist in another language.” — Hélène Dorion
Frank Borzage - The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic
Hervé Dumont, Foreword by Martin Scorsese
McFarland
🏆 Finalist for the Wall Award of the Theatre Library Association
This work brings to readers of English a comprehensive and engaging treatment of one of America’s greatest, if largely forgotten, film directors. Dumont’s celebrated 1993 study, translated from the French by Jonathan Kaplansky, offers complete coverage of Borzage’s entire career—the more than 100 films he made and the effect of those films on movie audiences, especially between 1920 and 1940.
Lavishly illustrated with 120 photographs, the book also contains a complete filmography, a chronological bibliography, and an index.
“Jonathan Kaplansky was hired by American publisher McFarland in 2005 to translate into English my biography of director Frank Borzage, a book that initially was released in 1993 as Frank Borzage, Sarastro à Hollywood and published by Cinémathèque française (Paris) and Gabriele Mazzotta (Milan). His remarkable work, renamed Frank Borzage - The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic even drew praise from filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who wrote the foreword to my book.
The truly literary quality of Mr. Kaplansky’s translation, as well as his ability to grasp all the nuances of a text that is not only extensive (more than 380 pages) and his care in analyzing in depth the work of a filmmaking giant greatly contributed to the success of the book in the United States.” — Hervé Dumont
Former director of the Swiss Film Archive (Lausanne)
Reading Nijinsky
Hélène Rioux
XYZ Publishing
A translator, fed up with translating paperback romances, undertakes the translation of the autobiography of a sadistic serial killer, Leonard Ming. She travels from Canada to Spain to do her work, encountering love and death in the seaside Andalusian town of Almuñecar.
“Reading Nijinsky, or
Traductrice de sentiments in French, is the first book of mine that Jonathan Kaplansky translated into English. That gave me the opportunity to meet him. A friendship was born. This book speaks of translation, and was very difficult to write, and no doubt difficult to translate. Some books require more than others from their author, when she has to dig inside herself, revealing secrets.
Reading Nijinsky was one of those. Translating it was every bit as demanding. Jonathan met the challenge with a great deal of rigour and sensitivity. I can’t thank him enough.” — Hélène Rioux