Friday Roch blogging: multilingual edition

Les hivers de mon enfance étaient des saisons longues, longues. Nous vivions en trois lieux: l’école, l’église et la patinoire; mais la vraie vie était sur la patinoire.

The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places — the school, the church and the skating-rink — but our real life was on the skating-rink.
-Roch Carrier, Le chandail de hockey/The hockey sweater

This is the quote on the Canadian five. When I read the story first, I read it as someone who got the wrong hockey shirt — the Leafs instead of the Habs! — but eventually I grew up and caught the fact that the teams were standing in for bigger things (like languages and people who spoke them).

A few years ago, a new children’s book came out, about someone growing up in rural Ontario, and he ordered the Leafs sweater, and instead — horrors! — he got a Habs sweater. Oddly, the reviews did not mention that this was the same book, only less well-written; all the letters responding to the reviews, however, did.

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