Chantal Ringuet (born in Quebec City) is a Canadian scholar, award-winning author and translator.

Biography

After completing a Ph.D. in literary studies (2007, UQÀM, Honourable Mention), Ringuet has been a postdoctoral Fellow in Canadian studies at the University of Ottawa (2007-8) and earned a master's degree in International Management at l'ÉNAP (2009). Since 2014, she has been a Fellow at YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Studies in New York, scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in Boston and translator-in-residence at the Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity, research associate at Concordia University's Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies (Montreal)^[1] and lecturer at the Institut européen Emmanuel Lévinas (AIU) in Paris.^[2] In Winter 2019, she was writer-in-residence (visiting scholar) at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University.^[3] She is the first writer to stay in the Gröndalshause Literature City Residence in Reykjavik UNESCO City of Literature (October 2019).^[4]

Her research and creative writing stands at the intersection of literature and visual arts, Jewish studies and translation studies. Focusing on the preservation and transmission of the collective memory and the Jewish heritage worldwide, Ringuet acts as a "cultural translator" of the diverse forms of Jewish civilization and identity. She has contributed to many art exhibition catalogues and translated literary works focusing on the cultural hybridity pervading contemporary artistic practices, and on the intergenerational transmission of trauma in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust. She translates from Yiddish and English to French.

Her first poetry book, Le sang des ruines (Écrits des Hautes-terres, Gatineau, 2010) focuses on two narrative voices of Holocaust survivors; it was awarded the prix littéraire Jacques-Poirier in 2009.^[5][6][7] Her second collection of poetry, Under the Skin of War (BuschekBooks, Ottawa, 2014)^[8] (written both in French and English), was inspired by the British photojournalist Don McCullin.^[9][10] Ringuet is also the author of À la découverte du Montréal yiddish (Éditions Fides, 2011)^[11][12] and she edited the first anthology of Canadian Yiddish literature in French translation, Voix yiddish de Montréal (Moebius, no 139, Montreal, 2013).^[13][14] With Gérard Rabinovitch, she has published Les révolutions de Leonard Cohen (PUQ, 2016), which received a 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award.^[15] With Pierre Anctil, she has published a translation of the early biography of Marc Chagall (Mon univers. Autobiographie, Fides, 2017), launched for the opening of the international exhibition Chagall : Colour and Music at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the biggest Canadian exhibition devoted to Marc Chagall.

According to Simone Grossman, professor at the Department of French language and culture at Bar-Ilan University, her poetry illustrates the power of "affiliative postmemory" (Marianne Hirsch) through the relation between image and text.^[16]

She has participated in many cultural and academic events, including at Harvard University, Yale University, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and was guest lecturer at the University of London, the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, the Toronto Jewish Literary Festival, KlezKanada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Blue Metropolis and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Bibliography

List of honours

Human rights involvement

On September 20, 2015, Ringuet has participated in the 2015 Rock'n'Roll Marathon Oasis de Montreal in order to raise funds for the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center. She has run in the memory of French writer and resistant Charlotte Delbo, and in the memory of all Jewish intellectuals who were deported in the concentration camps during World War II.^[20]

References

External links

• Web site of Chantal Ringuet
• Chantal Ringuet - Reykjavik City of Literature's Writer in Residence 2019
• Conférence sur Akadem, "L'exil dans l'oeuvre de Leonard Cohen", Novembre 2014.
• Robert Sarner, "Leonard Cohen turned this Montreal francophone into a champion of Jewish culture", The Times of Israel, July 28, 2018.