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"Back on April Eleventh" 1969
From: The Quebec Anthology
$0.78
"De retour le 11 avril," translated by Alan Brown as "Back on April Eleventh," first appeared in Liberté in the March-April 1969 issue, and was later reprinted in Point de fuite (1971) and in a posthumous collection of Aquin’s writing, Blocs erratiques (1977). In this story, Aquin depicts the self-destructive element he saw in many of Quebec’s intellectuals. "A dialogue of the deaf is taking place," he wrote in an essay entitled "La Fatigue culturelle du Canada français," "between thinkers who, by reducing their listeners to conditioned products, disabuse them at the same time of any illusions concerning their own intellectual strength." "Back on April Eleventh" depicts this intellectual frustration pushed to a feverish extreme. It not only foretells Aquin’s own death, but also warns against the death of independent thinking in modern Quebec.
Contributors
Hubert Aquin
Hubert Aquin was born in Montreal on October 24, 1929. He attended the Université de Montreal, where he studied philosophy, and then the Institut d'Études politiques in Paris, from 1948 to 1951, before returning to Montreal to work for Radio-Canada and the National Film Board. In the 1960s he helped found the political and literary journals Liberté and Parti pris, the latter a left-wing publication set up in opposition to the federalist journal Cité libre, to which Pierre Elliott Trudeau was a principle contributor. Aquin
