In memoriam Barbara Godard

Professor Emerita Barbara Godard, the Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian Literature at Toronto’s York University, suddenly left us on Sunday, 16 May 2010. Four months earlier, Barbara Godard had responded with her characteristic enthusiasm to my request, as TTR’s new book review editor, to write a review of Susan Petrilli’s tome Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement (Berlin, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2009). She was especially keen on reviewing the book because Lady Victoria Welby’s papers are housed in the York University archives. Barbara would take her students to look at them when she gave her year-long semiotics course and was pleased that some students had written about Lady Welby’s work. Barbara Godard had also recently referred to Victoria Welby’s writings in an essay on feminist approaches to semiotics that came out of talks delivered at the University of Bari. Her essay “Towards a Critical Semiotics: Feminist Interventions in Semiotic Theories” (pp. 161-190) was published in Approaches to Communication: Trends in Global Communication Studies edited by Susan Petrilli (Madison, Atwood Press, 2008). What Barbara appeared to find particularly fascinating was that “translation” was a key word used by Welby to refer to “significs” or semiotics. She was most pleased to receive her copy of Signifying and Understanding for review in early March 2010 and noted that chapter 5 included material on Welby’s theory of translation that complemented Susan Petrilli’s essay “Translation, Interpretation, and Common Meaning: Victoria Welby’s Significal Perspective” (TTR, 20, 1, pp. 13-98) as well as reprints of material on translation from the Welby achives at York University. Barbara Godard had agreed to submit her review of Signifying and Understanding in the fall of 2010, the date of this issue of TTR. Barbara Godard is deeply missed by the Translation Studies community both in Canada and abroad.