Happiness Has a Slippery Tail Book launch and tribute to Abla Farhoud

The University of Ottawa Press and Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore are pleased to invite you to the launch of , the English translation of Le bonheur a la queue glissante by the late author Abla Farhoud. This intimate evening will pay tribute to the celebrated novelist and playwright, who sadly passed away in 2021, by revisiting one of her landmark works. Translator Judith Weisz Woodsworth will share her experience working on the translation and, together with Alecka Farhoud, singer-songwriter and daughter of the author, will present a reading of selected passages in memory of Abla Farhoud.

This event is presented in both French and English.

About the book
This novel paints the portrait of a Lebanese family that has settled in Montreal. The central figure is Dounia, a 75-year-old mother and grandmother. Hers is a story of loss—she first leaves her own village to live in her husband’s hometown, and then is wrenched from her homeland, not once but twice, to live in a strange land whose language and customs are foreign to her.
Dounia can neither read nor write, and she speaks only Arabic. Illiterate yet perceptive, nourished by Lebanese proverbs and pearls of wisdom, she has a unique and captivating voice. She struggles, yes, but manages to achieve fulfilment in her new world: “My home is where my grandchildren are, clinging to my neck, calling me Sitto Dounia […] in my language. I want to die where my children and my grandchildren live.”

About the translator

Judith Woodsworth is a translator and Distinguished Professor Emerita at Concordia University. A specialist in translation history and theory, she has published Translators through History (with Jean Delisle), the monograph Telling the Story of Translation: Writers Who Translate, and the edited volumes The Fictions of Translation and Translation and the Global City: Bridges and Gateways. She has translated novels by Pierre Nepveu, Abla Farhoud, and Felicia Mihali, and was the receipient of the 2022 Governor General’s literary award for French-English translation for History of the Jews in Quebec by Pierre Anctil. She was founding president of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies. Woodsworth holds a PhD in French literature from McGill University.

About the author

Born in Lebanon in 1945, Abla Farhoud immigrated to Canada in 1951. She later moved back to Lebanon and spent some time in France. She studied theatre at the Université du Québec à Montréal and wrote several plays. In 1998, she published her first novel, Le bonheur a la queue glissante, for which she was awarded the Prix France-Québec – Philippe Rossillon. A number of acclaimed novels followed.
Abla Farhoud passed away in 2021. She is survived by her children—musician Mathieu Farhoud-Dionne, also known as Chafiik, and singer-songwriter Alecka Farhoud.

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