Translator Vivien Bosley, who translated Man Proposes, God Disposes: Recollections of a French Pioneer, will be speaking at Pleasant Valley Lodge Oct. 25 at 2 p.m. The talk is open to the public.
Bosley, a retired French professor, translated the memoir of a French pioneer in Athabasca into English. The book was printed by Athabasca University Press.
The original book, Athabasca, terre de ma jeunesse, is still available in French.
Pierre Maturié left France in October of 1910 and, along with two other men, set his sights on Lac La Biche, Alberta.
The town was well advertised in pamphlets spread all over France.
“We made the crossing on the Victorian, a ship of the Allan Line, and the voyage went without a hitch,” Maturié wrote. “The ship was no grey-hound of the seas, so it took twelve days — all in bad weather that gave some indication of what awaited us on the New Continent.”
Maturié describes his journey to Athabasca in great detail. He talks about buying horses for his trip north, and about his train ride from Montreal to Edmonton.
“For me, the trip was like a nature film: the train traversed mile upon mile of forest, forests that sometimes allowed us to glimpse, beneath their blanket of snow, a lake, a little log cabin with a plume of smoke rising from the chimney, the home of a settler trying to clear the land,” he writes, describing his train ride. “Night didn’t extinguish our curiosity, and I often took my time in lowering the blind; for in the clear, lovely, boreal moonlight those vast, snowy expanses took on an unreal, almost ghostly appearance.”
Maturié doesn’t leave out a single detail of his journey.
“On the second night there was an alert; the chief engineer on the train, a very lofty personage, came through each coach to take the men aside to warn them, without alarming the ladies, that they’d had word of a plot to stop and attack the train,” he wrote.
