Marie José Thériault

Marie José Thériault, poet, storyteller, translator (born 21 March 1945 in Montréal, Québec). She attended two élite private secondary schools in Montréal: Villa Maria and Collège Marie-de-France. Pursuing her interest in foreign languages and the performing arts, she also studied at the University of Florence and the Daria Collin Ballet Academy. From 1963 to 1966, she toured North America as a solo dancer with Julio Piedra and His Spanish Dance Company. In 1967 and 1968, she pursued further studies in dance in Barcelona and began to study voice in Milan, where she cut her first record. From 1968 to 1973, she sang, danced, and directed. She then left the stage to work in radio and television. In 1975, she was head of Éditions Hurtubise HMH and literary director in 1978, and she contributed to various literary reviews, such as XYZ, Vice & Versa and Liberté.

In 1971, Thériault began publishing collections of poetry and stories, as well as translations. The critical response to her first works of poetry--Poèmes (1972) and Pourtant le Sud... (1976)—was not favourable. Their style is lyrical and eloquent, with numerous archaic figures of speech and frequent mythological references. Lettera amorosa (1978) is an ode to a lover; the language is still high-flown, but the archaic figures are gone, replaced by a meditation on the body. In her collection La Cérémonie (1978), lyricism alternates with narration in stories that run the gamut from eroticism to strangeness to cruelty, all devoid of any spatial or temporal frame of reference. Thériault’s career as a poet was crowned with her receiving the 1984 Prix Canada-Suisse for her collection Invariance, which evoked the competition between the loved woman and America as a metaphor for her. In 1984, Thériault published Les Demoiselles de Numidie, a novel set in a fairyland where fantasy and reality mingle intimately; it is both a tribute to the sea and an ode to the bewitchment of love. Thériault has also received many awards for her translations, including, in 1987, the Governor General’s Literary Award for her French translation of Neil Bissoondath’s Digging Up the Mountains.