On the Road en français

My colleague Greg Bottoms and his class on travel narratives are currently reading On the Road, published 50 years ago this month. Despite the fact that it’s a key intertext in one of my favourite novels, Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, On the Road is a book I’ve still never gotten around to reading. Perhaps this year I will finally have a chance.

After reading yesterday that Kerouac in fact began writing On the Road in French in 1951, I happened across this 1967 interview from Radio-Canada. Born to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Mass, Kerouac spoke French reasonably well, as you can see from this interview, to which someone added subtitles to an excerpt and posted it on YouTube. The interview is less interesting for the content of the questions and answers than it is for seeing Kerouac shortly before his death and talking about his French-Canadian roots (that’s left out of this shorter clip on YouTube).