One of my favorite writers in the world is Jacques Poulin.

One of the finest and most underrated novelists in Québec.

[Poulin] shares a mix of detached humour, fantasy, and compassion with Vonnegut and Salinger.

Jacques Poulin’s writing is always a fortuitous encounter.  With each new book, the “little melody” created by Poulin refines the hypersensitivity of his literary project.  This new novel that he offers, short and dense, once again shows that the pleasure of storytelling, entirely feline, is for him a poetics of writing itself.

With all the talent of a goldsmith, Jacques Poulin weighs his words with finesse.  Each word in this short book of 112 pages carries the weight determined by its author, that of the heart.

Translation is a love story? Absolutely, just as that of readers with Jacques Poulin’s novels. This one will not disappoint them.

... these sentences that have been stripped, pumiced and polished until only the beauty of the grain remains, the fine drawing of time and patience....  'Language is the house of being,' says Jack Waterman, alter ego of Jacques Poulin, quoting Heidegger.  This house that Jacques Poulin fixes up and decorates, book by book, is a refuge where it is nice to come warm up.

We fall under the spell of this heartwarming, human novel, penned by Jacques Poulin at the summit of his art.

If familiarity and surprise have become the trademark of Poulin’s novels, it is evident that Translation Is a Love Affair does not deviate from this model; and Poulin’s reader continues to read it as if he/she would pay a visit to relatives, as much to reoccupy a familiar world as to discover that which is new.

Over and over, Poulin hits a note and holds it, singing it unchanging even as he adds new sounds to his novel's crescendo.

This title neatly sums up the bond between a translator and the text, and the new relationships between the author and his readers that a translation creates.