In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: TRANSLATIONS 383 eccentric. Indeed, the effect of Bill Ballantyne's AI Cornell in The AlCornell Story (Playwrights Canada, 64, $4.95 paper) relies on our having heard his opinions, stories, and wisecracks before. AI is not exactly a bore, but he is a little shopworn, and behind the assumed patter, evidently, more than a little frantic. A second-rate cocktail pianist, he talks about everything but his true self; the anecdotal versions run along the lines of the time he played with Buddy Rich. The populist rhetoric of his opinions of the world and its ways only makes plainer his pathetic evasiveness, and the action of the play largely sees him in retreat, from his agent and a challenging audition, from his family, and from his present job. But he does not disappear entirely: he is back at the piano in the closing scene,as full ofhis instant opinions as ever, a comic survivor. We are not to take his crisis too seriously, and the play is carried along by the sheer liveliness of his gab.
Canadian Men and Boys in A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence and Le Torrent by Anne Hebert, th Bibliographie Romans. Le torrent, Anne Hebert. Le torrent -- L'ange de Dominique -- La robe corail -- Le printemps de Catherine.
In David Type's Just Us Indians (Playwrights Canada, 55, $4.95 paper) the setting is once again domestic, and the people are the roomers in Mary's Cabbagetown house, whichis, as she puts it, something of 'a freak farm.' The play begins with a series of monologues of failure: from Mary, who has never escaped from her run-down neighbourhood; Bobby, an ageing transvestite; and Tashie, who has left her reservation in search of something better. 
Mary, at least, is armed with a defiant optimism which her experience has never dented, and she does what she can to impress it on those around her. She tries it even on Ted, an aggressive young thug who steals money from the house, and she succeeds to the extent that he brings it back when he has won more while gambling. Inspired by her reading of this episode as a parable, she literally transforms the whole world of the play, waving her broom like a wand to produce a stairway to the stars and pantomime costumes for everyone, closing the action with tongue-in-cheek fantasy.
Type's writing has wit and energy, and, if the play is hardly original, its vitality should impress both actors and audiences. Translations KATHY MEZEI 'I don't see what you have against her, except that she is so original.' Well, I don't like originals, I like translations.' Ludlow had more than once replied. 
(Henry James, The Portrait ofa Lady) The reader who likes translations has the pleasure of choosing among a diversity of texts this year: short stories, criticism, drama, poetry, novels both popular and post-modern, and two anthologies. One anthology is the number 47 special issue of Canadian Fiction Magazine (1983, 256, $7.50 paper), called 'A Decade of Quebec Fiction,' although it consists neither merely of short fiction nor of writing from the past decade (Ferron's tales date from 1968). It is, in fact, an eclectic collection of interviews (with Yves Theriault, Nicole Brossard), artfully composed photographs by Kero, an excerpt of Jovette Marchessault's latest play, Alice and Gertrude and Natalie and Rene [sic] and dear Ernest, selections from Jacques Brossard's Le Metamorfaux, Gerard Bessette's novel Le Garden-Party de Christophine, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska's feminist essay L'Echappeedes discours de I'reil, an engagingjournalarticleby. Jean Blouin and Jean-Pierre Myette, 'In Search of Rejean Ducharme,' and some shortfiction.