Transcreating the decolonial fragment

Novel written by Innu author Naomi Fontaine, Kuessipan (2011) has found another life as a movie in 2019. This transcreation by Myriam Verreault has received very little critical attention despite prestigious prizes and as interesting as daring transcreative qualities. However, transcreating Kuessipan had quite strong chances of being a failure considering, first, its style, then, its project – far from being narrated chronologically, this “novel” offers a poetic representation, through descriptions and portraits, of the life in the reservation and its inhabitants’ fate. Moreover, as a text dedicated to allochtoon readers, the problem of the destination was not minor. This corpus hence raises several questions: how was it possible to transcreate (1) the specificities of the fragments; (2) the dedication; (3) the elliptic and metaphorical style, conserving an important place to the Innu language; (4) the decolonial project that transpires from Kuessipan, novel and film?