Thinking back on my life in the precincts of the North American academy, I am struck by the variety it offered within a constant and recognizable ambience that I think of as distinctly American. I have lived and worked in the United States for half a century and feel grateful for both the unforeseen paths it opened for me and the stability it provided.

The epigraph for this address, which sets both theme and tone, is the first tercet of a love sonnet by the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard:

Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, ma dame;

Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons,

Et tôt serons étendus sous la lame….

Time moves on, time moves on, madam;

Alas, not time, but we are moving on,

And soon will be stretched out beneath the stone….

Mesdames et messieurs, chers amis, chers collègues, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and colleagues, I had hoped that the various Canadian laws concerning the obligatory use of both French and English on commercial products, in official government documents, on street signs in the province of Ontario, and in some schools would carry over to the 109th convention of the Modern Language Association of America and, for the occasion, to the whole of North America. For instance, I would have welcomed the obligation to deliver my address in French and in English, not translating sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph but using both languages in individual sentences, so that my salutation this evening would have been “Mesdames and gentlemen, dear friends et chers collègues.”