Donald Winkler

Donald Winkler (born 1940) is a Canadian documentary filmmaker and French-to-English literary translator.^[1][2] He lives in Montreal with his wife Sheila Fischman.^[3]

Life and career

Early life

Winkler was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and grew up loving theatre.^[4] He was introduced to French through his mother who studied the language in Romania before coming to Canada when she was fifteen years old.^[1] As a student, he took French courses alongside his literary studies at the University of Manitoba where he graduated in 1961.^[1] He also went on to do graduate studies at the Yale School of Drama.^[2] In his early twenties, he spent a year and a half in Paris teaching English where he enjoyed watching films at the Cinématheque and the little Latin Quarter art houses.^[4] When he returned to Canada, he was drawn to Montreal because, for him, it was “the only city in the country at that time cosmopolitan enough”.^[4] The city was also the headquarters for the National Film Board of Canada, where Winkler first began making films.^[4] He applied for an apprenticeship position that did not require film experience and was hired in 1967 when one of the three initial applicants declined the offer.^[4] He learned the trade on the job and within a couple of years, began working on his first film.^[4]

Film career

Winkler has been an independent filmmaker since leaving the National Film Board where he worked as a documentary film director and writer from 1967 to 1995.^[1] His films primarily deal with the arts and culture in Canada.^[1] He wrote and directed a number of films that look into the lives of Canadian playwrights, writers and musicians such as Irving Layton, F.R. Scott, P.K. Page, Al Purdy, Earle Birney, Ralph Gustafson and Tomson Highway.^[1] In the year 2005, he entered his three films: Moshe Safdie: The Power of Architecture, The Pines of Emily Carr and The Colour of Memory: Conversations with Guido Molinari into the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal.^[5]

Translation

Winkler first began translating Quebec literature in the late 1980s.^[2] Although he never studied translation, he has since translated over 25 works including novels and poetry.^[6][7] He is a five-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award and has won three times in 1994, 2011 and 2013 for The Lyric Generation, Partita for Glenn Gould and The Major Verbs.^[8] Winkler describes the process of translation as “a constant quest for perfect pitch” and a “sophisticated word game”.^[6][3] A successful translation, in his words, gives readers “some sense of what it’s like to be in another culture’s skin”.^[6] His most recent translation, published in 2015, was of a short story collection Arvida, which was a collaborative effort with author Samuel Archibald.^[9] He is a member of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada.^[10] His spouse, Sheila Fischman, is also an award-winning translator, whom Winkler describes as the “doyenne of Canadian literary translation”.^[3]

References