All my originals are important poems. Nothing like them exists in English, for the excellence of a poet depends on the unique opportunities of his native language. I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make them ring right for me.
Robert Lowell, Imitations
I wish I did not understand how much of your soul resides within this manuscript; it adds to both my pain at the exquisite agony of what you have achieved, and my enhanced obligation to ensure that we publish this well. Literature was ever a mixed blessing, I suppose.
Scott McIntyre to Robert Bringhurst
. . . to collaborate consciously is to be reminded that one is never in fact free of collaboration when working with words. Language, which is one of the most private and intimate of possessions, is also always a gift. “Thus there has never yet been a single poet,” Mandelstam says. I speak, therefore I was and cease to be.
Robert Bringhurst, “Arrogations”1
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Rain was general all over the northern coast of British Columbia, as it so often is. To the west was the ocean, unknown and dangerous. This was Siigaay: open water. A long passage was required before landfall. The crossing of Hecate Strait, a body of water named for a surveyor’s ship, was rough, and on the horizon earth and water and sky, the three realms of which the chthonian goddess had a share, appeared to meet. The traveller was a reader, and the journey one of the imagination. Before the reader had gone a poet; long before the poet had sailed a linguist.
Their travels were far more perilous, but any reader of Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife (1999, 2011) is perforce a voyager. The book, which leads into a west both geographical and figurative, is concerned with the islands south of Ketchikan, Alaska, and west of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, that are called Haida Gwaii and sometimes still the Queen Charlottes; and with a peripheral place beyond the familiar world that is yet its own centre.2 The book also leads into the historical and mythological past in order to suggest a new vision, at once deeply traditional and progressive, of the humanities in North America. And thus it brings readers into contact with its author’s revisionary conceptions of poetry, literature, and mythology. A Story as Sharp as a Knife, the first volume of the trilogy entitled Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, is the central work in Bringhurst’s extended exploration of Haida literature and culture. It describes and explicates the qqaygaang of Haida Gwaii – “what people fond of literature call oral narrative poems” (Story [2011] 29).3 Some readers, of course, will not find Haida culture distant or foreign. They may instead recognize it as their own, or as a neighbouring domain. But Bringhurst’s books make this world anew as they pay homage to it. His translations of Haida poetry, like all such interpretations, are simultaneously recreations and inventions. This essay aims to trace the voyages on which readers of his books may find themselves, as well as the earlier journeys of the poet Bringhurst and the linguist and ethnographer John Reed Swanton, who together have become, despite the gulf of time between them, pivotal figures in the recent history of Haida literature. There is only one reader on whose behalf I can truly speak, but I hope in what follows to offer a commentary on Bringhurst’s Masterworks that has general relevance even as it stems necessarily from the personal experience of reading.
A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World was published by Douglas & McIntyre in 1999. Nine Visits to the Mythworld, by Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, was published in 2000, and Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay followed in 2001; they are composed of Bringhurst’s translations.4 The three volumes are closely related to other products of Bringhurst’s literary and scholarly interests in Indigenous cultures, those of the Northwest Coast in particular, and especially to his several works on aspects of Haida art and myth, such as The Raven Steals the Light (1984; 2nd ed. 1996), a collaboration with Bill Reid, the Haida sculptor claimed by Bringhurst as teacher and fatherly figure (Tree 297); The Black Canoe (1991; 2nd ed. 1992), a book about one of Reid’s famous sculptures; and Solitary Raven (2000; 2nd ed. 2009), a selection of Reid’s writings.5 With its two companions, A Story as Sharp as a Knife forms an imposing block on the shelf. The conclusions to be drawn from the size of books are perhaps as dubious as the proverbial judgments made from their covers, but the heft of the Haida trilogy nonetheless proclaims the scale of Bringhurst’s project of translation. By any measure the books occupy a prominent place in his oeuvre. In his translations and analyses of Haida poetry, Bringhurst has realized a vision of contemporary literature as a renewal of the literary past, and attained a synthesis of scholarship and art. As he has suggested, A Story as Sharp as a Knife is an acknowledgment of the intellectual and aesthetic value that he has discerned in Haida literature: “Haida was not the first Native American language I studied,” he wrote, “but it absorbed my full attention for many years, and the debt I owe to the classical Haida mythtellers is as great as any cultural debt I have ever incurred” (Story 10–11). The book and the accompanying volumes of translations are as deeply rooted in place as they are in time: the original Haida works are inseparable from their insular context, and the translations thereof represent a major contribution to the literature in English of the North Pacific region. The cartographic fragment on the cover of Bringhurst’s Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1986) shows part of the Boundary Ranges, the northern reach of the Coast Mountains in British Columbia, in the vicinity of Mount Reilly. The image, suggesting a close connection between poetry and locale, is but one of many ways in which his works have reflected the mountainous and marginal landscapes of western North America. The Haida trilogy constitutes a sustained reckoning with a literary tradition that belongs to and depends upon a particular coastal world, but the immense achievements of the books are not wholly separate from Bringhurst’s career as a translator, nor from his prolonged literary reconnaissance of the Northwest Coast, a region that he has come to call home.6 In his Haida translations he has written – or, to be more accurate, rewritten – poems of his time and place, the poems, in the phrase of Wallace Stevens, his “Connecticut uncle,” of his climate (Selected 61).
Bringhurst begins A Story as Sharp as a Knife by setting, in novelistic fashion, the geographical stage of his literary, linguistic, and cultural study: “A hundred miles into the Pacific, drenched in rain and wind and mist and sunlight, lie the islands known as Haida Gwaii. In September 1900, a young, soft-spoken linguist with a new degree from Harvard and a bundle of instructions from his mentor stepped ashore there, planning to stay half a year, learning what he could of the Haida language, and of Haida life and thought and social structure” (13).7 The sentences are graceful. The polysyndeton in the opening and closing lists creates a rhythm that may be thought to evoke the King James Version – a fitting intimation for a book about translation. In a related passage, however, Bringhurst is careful to note that although the distance to Haida Gwaii has an allure, the isolation of the archipelago is a trick of perspective: “If you triangulate from Paris and New York, Jerusalem and Rome, the Haida village of Hlghagilda may seem, in consequence, remote. It is true the outside world has taken from it less than what it offered and a great deal more than it could give – and that is one definition of remote. But it needed, and still needs, little or nothing of what the colonial world can offer. In that sense, it is not remote at all. In fact, like every place where birds sing and people pause to listen and a storyteller speaks, it is the center of the world” (31).
A century ago, Haida Gwaii was difficult to reach. Swanton, Bringhurst’s “soft-spoken linguist,” noted the relative inaccessibility of the islands, and in particular of “Skidegate which was connected with the outside world by one steamer a month out of Victoria, and Massett [sic] on the north coast of Graham Island, which enjoyed one steamer annually bringing supplies for the Hudson Bay Post [sic]” (“Notes” 26). Despite the infrequency of the boats, Haida Gwaii was then already part of encompassing colonial, commercial, religious, and anthropological spheres. Swanton the recorder of oral texts visited the Queen Charlotte Islands not with specifically literary ambitions, but as a result of the great anthropological rush on western North America, of which the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902) was a part. As Swanton explained with some humour in a memoir of his anthropological career,
Morris K. Jesup, Director of the American Museum of Natural History had made a very large grant of money for anthropological work on and near the North Pacific coast and Dr. [Franz] Boas had been placed in charge of this. Anthropologists being scarce in that epoch, Dr. Boas made an arrangement with the Bureau of American Ethnology by which I was to conduct an investigation among the Haida Indians during the winter of 1900–1901, the American Museum paying my field expenses and the Bureau my salary. My salary being fifty dollars a month, that made no great drain on the latter. (“Notes” 25)8
The literature about which Bringhurst writes in A Story as Sharp as a Knife is the creation, as he strenuously suggests, of individual Haida storytellers whose capacity for invention and rendition is unsurpassed. But the Haida poetry as it is found in his books is equally a corollary of the historical forces that have, since the late eighteenth century, yoked Haida Gwaii into the “outside world,” and of the encounters between Indigenous peoples and newcomers to the continent that have had cataclysmic consequences.
A Story as Sharp as a Knife is a primer of Haida oral literature. A work of literary criticism that draws upon linguistics, ethnography, and philological and comparative studies of oral poetics, it describes the conventions of Haida oratory, the storytellers themselves (whom Bringhurst treats as literary authors), and the conditions under which Haida oral works were recorded and thus made a permanent, circulating part of the world’s library. Venerable figures such as Milman Parry and Albert Lord figure in his study, while the contemporary scholarship of Dell Hymes is a major presence. The structuralist analyses of Claude Lévi-Strauss are a model for Bringhurst, although his methods diverge from those of the French anthropologist; he emphasizes, in explicit contrast to both Lévi-Strauss and Franz Boas before him, the distinctiveness of individual authors, the specificity of times and places in which texts were recorded, and the particularities of different versions of the same story (Story 15–16, 139–41).9 He attempts to supply the context necessary for readers to appreciate the works of the oral poets, whose achievements he celebrates along with the contributions of Swanton, the extraordinarily skilled listener who recorded the Haida speakers and from whose ethnographic publications and unpublished papers Bringhurst worked. Nine Visits to the Mythworld is devoted to the poetry of Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, whose English name was Walter McGregor. Being in Being contains the works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, also known as John Sky. A chorus of voices sounds in A Story as Sharp as a Knife: those of Skaay and Ghandl, and of Daxhiigang, Gumsiiwa, Haayas, and others, including Swanton, who emerges as a proleptic figure of Bringhurst himself. The three books have been celebrated and castigated, hailed as landmarks and reviled as amateur and unwelcome attempts to render Haida cultural property as poetry in English – a translation not only from one language to another, but also from the private orbit of the Haida to the public sphere of the literary establishment, the crucial translation from voice to print having already been effected by Swanton and his colleagues on Haida Gwaii.10 The books evoke the dismal colonial past, and have been enmeshed in contemporary debates about authorial obligations and privileges. They have been controversial and polarizing as poetry today rarely is; their reception has reflected the acrimony of political and cultural relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and institutions, and has been in part a victim of Bringhurst’s view that literature, including Haida oral literature, should enjoy “universality of access” (Story 424).
The title of A Story as Sharp as a Knife is puzzling. How can a story be sharp? Well into the book, Bringhurst writes that “There is a proverb widely known on the Northwest Coast, and evidently ancient, though you’ll hear it much more often now in English than in Haida or Tlingit or Nisgha. In southern Haida it is this: Tlgaay higha ttlabju’waaga” (373).11 In English it means “The world is as sharp as a knife,” a phrasing that, he explains, derives from Tlingit and the German of Boas (373, 495n2). Bringhurst also proposes a more literal version: “Tlgaay, ‘the earth’ (or the ground, or the place); higha, ‘straight up’; ttlabju’waaga, ‘is shaped like a woodcutter’s wedge or the head of an axe’” (373). In Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida (1905), Swanton observed that the “saying at Masset” was intended “To signify the narrow margin between life and death, and what a slight cause is required to bring about a change from one to the other” (37). There would seem as well to be a moral aspect to the proverb – a cautioning that life must be lived with humility and attention. Bringhurst does not state directly the meaning that he finds in the adage. He instead supplies a short anecdote (or “folktale”), told by Kihlguulins (Henry Edenshaw) and recorded by Swanton in 1901 (Story 496n3 [ch. 20]), “that enshrines and elucidates the proverb” (373): “A man once said to his careless son: The world is as sharp as a knife. If you don’t watch out, you’ll fall right off. His son replied that the earth was wide and flat; no one could fall off. And as he kicked at the ground to show how solid and reliable it was, he ran a splinter into his foot and died soon after” (373).12 Bringhurst presents moreover a story told by Xhyuu to Swanton in 1900, which he describes as “a theorem of greater scope” than the simple mathematical formula to which he compares the proverb (374). It “concerns the fate of Qquuna, Xhyuu’s and Skaay’s ancestral village” (374), and suggests the constant possibility of destruction and renewal alike – the nearness of life and death.13
The shift from proverb (“The world is as sharp as a knife”) to title (“A story as sharp as a knife”) is an epitome of Bringhurst’s emphasis on literariness and authorship, and it signals the potency of the translated works: the stories are trenchant, the title implies, and concern the fundamental nature of the world. Bringhurst casts Xhyuu as “Skaay’s patron” and “one of Swanton’s first collaborators and hosts” (384); he was a vital figure in the transmission of the oral works. “Patron,” “collaborator,” “host”: the terms intimate that Swanton found himself in an artistic milieu of considerable complexity, and that the oral storytellers were engaged in something altogether different from merely relaying information. Indeed, Bringhurst contends that the storytellers were literary creators, in contradistinction to the outmoded but persistent view that they were simply conveyors of traditional stories. He foregrounds the identities of Skaay, Ghandl, and other orators, deliberately resisting the former ethnographic practice of treating recorded texts as virtually anonymous sources of representative cultural and linguistic data. In the fifth chapter of A Story as Sharp as a Knife, “Oral Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Bringhurst discusses storytellers’ skilled uses of traditional stories, formulaic phrases, and quotatives (113–19); and in the ninth chapter, “The Shaping of the Canon,” he describes various forms and themes of Haida oratory as they are treated by individual tellers in discrete performances (200–11). His witty, unmistakable allusion to T.S. Eliot suggests the seriousness of his canonizing efforts, as if to say that here are the existing monuments of Haida oral literature that form among themselves an ideal order.
The titular simile also hints at an equivalence between literature and carving or sculpture, as though a story or poem could uncover, as a knife exposes the shape concealed in the wood, an aspect of the world that otherwise passes unseen. A telling remark about tools appears in A Story as Sharp as a Knife: “The dugout and the paddle and the spear, the stone knife, shell knife, bow and arrow, deadfall, snare, and the fishhook, fishclub, fishing line and bone harpoon are working works of art, not the products of assembly lines and factories. No two such tools are the same. None, as a result, is just a tool, and none works by purely material means. In such a world, there are no dumb animals and no inert materials. Everything that is has ears and voices, and every word a human being speaks is overheard” (282). The description is ostensibly of the indispensable tools of traditional Haida culture and of coastal cultures generally, but Bringhurst suggests that such implements are part of the wider animate world. A clue that poetry is not far removed from this discussion lies in a much earlier work. Bringhurst wrote in The Beauty of the Weapons (1982) that “a man’s selected poems ought to mean not his washed and dressed historical record but his living repertory: not a catalogue of the animals he has named but a festival of those who are still speaking” (7). The tool as work of art, the speaking animal, and the living poem: from these images emerges a sense of poetry as a link between the poet and an inspirited earthly realm. A reference in A Story as Sharp as a Knife to Bill Reid, to whose memory the book is dedicated (7), further links sculpture to oral poetry: “Insofar as the mythtellers are artists, insofar as they are shamans, insofar as they are faithful to their visions and their dreams, they stand apart from the community they serve without ever ceasing to serve it. That was the predicament of the finest Haida carver I have known; I think it was the predicament of the finest Haida poets I have read. And I imagine this dictates in some degree the kind of life their works can lead, later, in our midst” ([1999] 422).
As Bringhurst affirms, storytellers in oral cultures are literary authors, but their mandate is the perpetuation and reimagination of tradition, not invention for its own sake. Like sculptors, they reveal the shape of things in the service both of the community and of their own vision. “Laß dir Alles, said the poet / who apprenticed with a sculptor, / as certain poets must,” Bringhurst wrote in “How the Sunlight Gets Where It’s Going” (88).14 The poet in this case is Rilke, but it is possible to view Bringhurst as another sculptor-poet, one whose works represent a form of solitary collaboration with or apprenticeship to the absent teachers of the past. Bringhurst explains that an earlier name for the Queen Charlotte Islands, “Xhaaydla Gwaayaay,” means “The Islands on the Boundary between Worlds” (Story 332; cf. 20, 53); on this margin, water and sky are scarcely separated by land. Such barriers are porous in Haida cosmology, and beings sometimes pass through them. Straits of time and language impede readers who long to travel between worlds; but translators ferry us from shore to shore in canoes of their own making.
Bringhurst’s compendious introduction to the literary traditions of Haida Gwaii and his two subsequent volumes of Haida poetry are his most substantial works of translation and commentary. The scale of the Haida trilogy, however, should not overshadow the importance of translation to his literary career in its entirety. He has been a translator for as long as he has been a poet; this aspect of his vocation has shaped virtually all other dimensions thereof, including poetry in English, literary and cultural criticism, and even typographical theory. The number of languages in The Elements of Typographic Style (1992, 1996, 2004) indicates the breadth of Bringhurst’s literary universe. Although The Elements of Typographic Style is genuinely a practical guide to typography, it also espouses a humanist vision of global literary activity founded on the understanding that literature is multicultural, multilingual, and multiform. The humane typographer has an obligation to meet the technical demands of any language when designing the page and working with type – to “honor,” Bringhurst writes, “the variety and complexity of human language, thought and identity, instead of homogenizing or hiding it” (89). The contrary example is provided by “large-circulation newspapers in North America still unwilling to spell correctly even the names of major cities, composers and statesmen, or the annual list of winners of the Nobel Prize, for fear of letters like ñ and é” (90). Translators and typographers alike work with existing materials, moulding text into other languages or shapes. That Bringhurst has understood himself as a craftsman and the poet as faber is suggested by a remark concerning poetic composition: “I always have the sense, in composing a poem, that I am engaged in making something. I do not have the sense that I am making anything up. Composition, it seems to me, is itself a form of translation. Call it primary rather than secondary translation” (in Engler et al. 302). Poetry and translation are taken to be nearly synonymous, even if Bringhurst speaks here of translation not solely in the usual sense. His volumes of Haida poetry are a manifestation – perhaps the culmination – of a long-standing poetic project of revising the literary past. In many cases he has translated and adapted poems and sacred texts that fathom the nature of existence – the character of being. “Secondary translation” is thus linked to the metaphysical aspects of his own “primary translation.”
When Bringhurst defended his MFA thesis at the University of British Columbia in 1975, he was twenty-eight years old. That period of his life was a time of transitions. Behind him were two apprentice-works published by his own Kanchenjunga Press, The Shipwright’s Log (1972) and Cadastre (1973), the titles of which register a conception of the poet as builder and recorder, and a long period of itinerancy. Bergschrund (1975) would soon be published by Sono Nis, the imprint of J. Michael Yates, who had taught in the Department of Creative Writing at UBC, which was then something of a hotbed of literary translation. (Yates’s Insel: The Queen Charlotte Islands Meditations [1983], a volume of poetry, belongs to the same geographical sphere as Bringhurst’s writings on Haida Gwaii. Insel is German for “island.”) His earliest efforts have largely been eliminated from his current selection of poems, as Iain Higgins demonstrates in this volume, but The Shipwright’s Log and Cadastre remain significant as markers of his prevailing interest in translation and comparative poetics, and as sources of illumination of the later works. Bringhurst’s thesis included both his own poems and poems in translation.15 The first section consisted of poems that would be published (with some changes) as Bergschrund; the second section comprised translations from Arabic and Greek. In this phase of his career translation and poetry coexisted, the line between them sometimes blurred. “Empedokles: Seven Fragments,” for instance, was included among the translations in the thesis, but appears in Bergschrund without being designated specially as a translation. What in the thesis was a translation of Badr Shakir el-Sayyab’s “City of Mirage” is in Bergschrund “City of Mirage,” a poem “IN MEMORIAM: Badr Shakir el-Sayyab (1926–1964).”16 Some years later, in a review of The Beauty of the Weapons, Sam Hamill aptly observed that Bringhurst “combines translation with imaginative writing as well as anyone since [Kenneth] Rexroth and [Robert] Duncan” (188).17
The history of English-language poetry in the twentieth century offers many models of the translator-poet, including Ezra Pound, whose encounters with the poetic traditions of several languages anticipate the sense of vocation that Bringhurst has often expressed. Rexroth, a follower of Pound and a Pacific regionalist whose poetry at times Bringhurst’s resembles, was a prolific translator. Gary Snyder’s regional writing, like some of Bringhurst’s, forges connections between the coastal West of North America and the Far East, and turns to Indigenous traditions as sources of local wisdom; Snyder has also written about Swanton’s Haida texts. But as a translator of Indigenous literature, Bringhurst has collaborators, correspondents, and contemporaries in that field of study in addition to his strictly poetic precursors and associates and his colleagues in the métiers of typography and fine printing, although inevitably these groups overlap. Notable figures in his realm of transcription, translation, and interpretation include John Enrico, a scholar of Haida linguistics; Catharine McClellan and Julie Cruikshank, anthropologists who have worked with Tlingit and Tagish storytellers; Richard Dauenhauer and Nora Marks Dauenhauer, who have made tremendous contributions to the study of Tlingit oratory; Robin Ridington, a scholar of Dane-zaa traditions; and Brian Swann, a translator and anthologist. Such authors (among others) have helped to expand the normative definition of literature in North America, and their works have conjoined the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism; Bringhurst’s Haida volumes likewise belong to this disciplinary nexus.
Poets have often claimed licence to translate freely. Artistic liberty in some cases has taken precedence over knowledge of the source language, as in the notorious example of Christopher Logue’s renditions of the Iliad in War Music and other volumes. In translation the risk is constantly present of violating decorum – of misunderstanding, misrepresenting, or otherwise distorting the original works. Sometimes translators court this danger or indulge it; at other times violations occur despite their intentions. Robert Lowell’s assertion of the poet’s prerogative – “I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make them [i.e., “my originals”] ring right for me” (Imitations xiii) – communicates an idea voiced repeatedly by poets, namely that they are entitled or even obliged to make their translations their own poems.18 Bringhurst’s translations from languages other than Haida have not in the main been controversial, regardless of the degree of poetic freedom that he has exercised, nor have they been accompanied by extensive annotations and exegeses. The Haida trilogy is distinguished by its apparatus criticus: A Story as Sharp as a Knife is the mammoth introduction necessitated by the other two volumes. The philological and historical orientation of A Story as Sharp as a Knife seemingly has more in common with Bringhurst’s learned writing on typography and publishing than with his poetry; yet his examination of oral storytelling in Haida Gwaii resonates with his conception of poetry in general as a spoken art. In his introductory note to The Blue Roofs of Japan: Duet for Interpenetrating Voices (1986), Bringhurst explains that “Reading the poem aloud requires two people”; their voices create an oral and aural text “in principle little different from a sonata for cello and piano” (Selected 175). Here is a metaphor for the translator, who makes music in conversation with his absent interlocutors, and whose own voice becomes tangled with theirs, or braided, to use the term that Dennis Lee chooses in his contribution to the present collection of essays.
Bringhurst’s study of Haida literature has been said to have begun in earnest in 1982, the year in which he turned thirty-six and published The Beauty of the Weapons, an admired volume that surveys and revises the works of a young man. On the book’s cover he is described as a poet of the coastal West: “His home territory spans the mountain peaks and ocean vistas of the Pacific coast.”19 In 1999, when A Story as Sharp as a Knife was published, Bringhurst turned fifty-three. The labours in which he was engaged in the intervening decade and a half reflected his attachment to place, and represented a form of self-apprenticeship to the cultures of that “home territory.” If his translations of Haida literature belong to his corpus of interpretations, they are also part of his self-education in the literature of a region – to his struggle to become a true writer of the North Pacific Coast, which would require him to learn about local traditions without blundering into mimicry or nostalgia (see Story 422).20
Bringhurst’s interests in particular languages naturally emanate from, or otherwise accord with, aspects of his biography. His translations of Arabic poetry, for example, correspond to time spent in the Middle East.21 His translations of Haida texts emerge from his fascination with the Indigenous cultures of a region chosen as an aesthetic and ideological home as well as a geographical place in which to reside, one that has served for him as a site of imagined meetings of traditions. In the introductory note to Tzuhalem’s Mountain (1982), he described the poem, which is nominally tied to Vancouver Island, as an “Anishnabe-Madhyamika-Gringo sonata” – a musical fusion of elements of distant cultures (6). In A Story as Sharp as a Knife, Bringhurst observes the presence of a foreign artifact in an oral text: “As further proof that this is a poem concerned with history more than with mythtime, a piece of distinctly historical hardware – a pocket knife – appears in the opening lines” (299). The oral poem functions, he writes, as “a narrative deed of land and declaration of title” (298).22 That description provides an analogy for his poetry and translations, which, in a different register, signal allegiance to places by paying homage to local literature. His renditions of Haida poetry are in this regard akin to “The Origin of Mind,” his translation of and commentary upon a portion of a Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) text told by Saayaacchapis and transcribed by Edward Sapir in 1913 (Everywhere 269–83) – another fragment of the literature of the North Pacific. Bringhurst’s writing does not lay claim to land or culture in an appropriative sense; on the contrary, it demonstrates a grave historical understanding of colonialism and dispossession of land and language. His study of the literature of the Coast is instead a means of resisting the historical and economic forces that have conditioned the present: “Church and state, which sought to end the potlatch – and lately state and business, which have urged that it be revived as a tourist attraction – have not succeeded in exterminating Native American intellectual culture, but they have indeed succeeded in dampening its vigor and reducing its extent” (Everywhere 281).23 Bringhurst’s works attend to that intellectual life and engage it.
To be at home on the Pacific coast, or anywhere else in the Americas, is to face the barbarities and injustices of the colonial enterprise. Much of Bringhurst’s writing responds to the horrors of the New World, although in some cases the connection between text and context is implicit rather than overt. His works are postcolonial in a very precise sense. He has explained “Hachadura”, for instance, by linking the Central American village for which the poem is named to a hemispheric plight and to universal aspects of human life: “I thought, when I composed this piece, that the moral weather in El Salvador had nothing local about it: that it had gathered out of a heritage (exemplified by the European rape of the Americas), a condition (ignorance, hunger, despair) and a biology (soft flesh and sharp talons) which belong acutely to us all” (Beauty 72). In A Story as Sharp as a Knife he plainly describes colonial violence: “Cultural warfare is a practice of great antiquity, possibly as old as culture itself. But death and forced re-education came to the Haida with stunning force. Europeans, so far as we know, tasted cultural warfare in a similarly concentrated form only when Stalin and Hitler opened their camps” (71). Like his other works, Bringhurst’s translations of Haida literature are bound to the idiosyncrasies of his life, and to the larger literary and historical contexts in which they were written and published. The hostility with which they were received in some quarters also belongs to a moment in time. To come to terms with the trilogy, readers must balance the circumstances in which the translations were produced and first read against the circumstances in which the oral texts were recorded nearly a century before – to attend to history and geography as well as to literary form.
Dryden wrote that “Virgil employ’d Eleven Years upon his Æneis, yet he left it as he thought himself imperfect” (320). The preparation of A Story as Sharp as a Knife and the ensuing books was its own epic. The handwritten and typed drafts show that Bringhurst revised his translations heavily. His papers include letters expressing concern about aspects of the first book’s manufacture – its binding, the colours used for the cover, the positioning of photographs, missing characters, and similar matters.24 Many difficulties stemmed from the inherent complexity of the volume, while others appear to have been caused by technical errors. Of even greater consequence was the issue of the book’s classification. Bringhurst objected to the way in which A Story as Sharp as a Knife was to be catalogued and therefore defined:
I realize the librarians cannot read every book they classify, and that they have their established categories and classifications, and that these cannot be cavalierly overturned. But it is not satisfactory for the catalogue entry to subvert the central thesis of a book.
The central thesis of this book is that the texts reproduced, translated and discussed here ARE NOT folklore; they are literature instead. They have individual authors, whom I have gone to some trouble to identify, and the works are treated as the works of individuals.
I do not insist that the words folklore and legends be removed from the catalogue entry; but I think it is extremely important that at least one alternative classification be supplied. HAIDA ORAL LITERATURE or HAIDA POETRY are my suggestions.25
Bringhurst’s gambit in the trilogy was to insist on the singularity of the storytellers’ accomplishments while simultaneously asserting the broad appeal and importance of the oral poetry. That significance consists in part in the complex visions of reality embodied in the poems, which provide an alternative to colonial perspectives on lands and peoples. Bringhurst has suggested that mythology and music, like literature and dance, can serve a corrective, heuristic purpose: “Musicians and mythtellers can, in their way, make spaces from pieces of time, and choreographers and playwrights can also make time out of pieces of space. The results are sometimes rich and lovely works – the motets of Josquin, or Shakespeare’s plays – but surely these are maps, portraits, models, not the real thing. And it is precisely because they are models that we can replay them, which we cannot do with history itself” (First 
6). Elsewhere he has observed that he requires “models” that afford a sense of the entirety of human existence: “What I need as a human being is a picture of the whole of human history. And what I need as a practicing writer is a picture of the whole of human literary history. I need a picture rich in local detail but also with a sense of shape” (in Engler et al. 310). The Haida poetry represents an essential piece of this map. Bringhurst’s assertion that the oral texts are works of art allows them to be compared to the works of Josquin and Shakespeare; it permits the eclectic approach that would grant a sense of the whole.
Clarity is often cited by Bringhurst as a literary and philosophical virtue. In his translations he has striven to recover, in a phrase from an early essay, “the silence and meaning of the most literate of the ancients” (“Aeschylus” 4). But translation is always provisional, no matter how meaningful the original work may be. As he notes, “Part way is as far as translation can go. If you want to cross all the way, you must learn the language instead” (in Engler et al. 313). If “There is nothing that can be translated perfectly,” however, “there is nothing,” in his view, “that cannot be translated” (309). Bringhurst’s literary criticism, like his poetry, is profoundly comparative. It suggests that the linguistic, cultural, and geographical distances between archipelagos and centuries can be bridged by the common elements of mythological, literary, and artistic traditions. It is an ancient and widespread view that poetry originates beyond the poet. When authors summon the Muse to relate the causes and the crimes; or invoke her aid to their adventurous songs; or feel a blessing in the gentle breeze, they gesture to something outside themselves, even as they remain the singers of their songs. Bringhurst’s poetry of translation evokes this otherness – wilderness, the gods, being itself – and marks the importance in various times and places of the unending quest to understand it. The title of his “Arrogations,” an unpublished book of translations, implies that translators must take what is not rightfully theirs – good poets steal, as Eliot slyly claimed – and that to do so is an expression of insolence (i.e., “arrogance”). The term also has a legal sense: under Roman law to arrogate was to adopt, under certain conditions, a child. The translator-poet is part thief, part parent; he fathers-forth poems whose beauty is past change, taking in poetic “children” and making them his own. Good poets turn what they have stolen into something better, Eliot said. They make it new, Pound said. One of the gifts of language is to bring the old, the forgotten, the unknown into the light.
The translations of Haida poetry demand of their ideal reader considerable learning and linguistic aptitude. To illustrate critical opportunities and challenges that attend them, I will consider in what follows a story told by Ghandl, a brief “poem” (Story 34) of three hundred lines that is the first of the Haida works presented and analyzed in A Story as Sharp as a Knife (ch. 1, “Goose Food,” Story 34–45): Bringhurst employs the poem as an entrée into Haida oral literature. In Nine Visits to the Mythworld, the story (83–94) is given the title “In His Father’s Village, Someone Was Just about to Go Out Hunting Birds.” He describes the subject matter as “the universal story of the hunter who sees, as in a vision, the beauty of his prey and falls in love with what he came to kill. The two basic plots – man marries a bird who is a woman, or a woman who is a bird, then loses her again; and man climbs a pole to visit the sky but cannot remain where he doesn’t belong – are part of the ancient stock of human stories” (Story 45). The narrative is, Bringhurst notes, a version of the “‘Swan Maiden tale’” (45; cf. 445n13), and in his assessment its power depends upon “the juxtaposition and interpenetration of timelessness and time” (49). But even with such archetypal and thematic explanations as guides, the reader’s route through the poem may be taxing. The interpretative challenge is to examine the English text as poetry without wrenching it from its cultural context: although the content of the narrative and the style of Bringhurst’s translation may be accessible to outsiders, the Haida world may remain alien despite the translator’s extensive glosses.
Ghandl’s poem begins with the introduction of a hero. He is announced with the customary quotative that indicates that the narrative takes place in the timeless past of the mythical realm: “There was a child of good family, they say” (34). The unnamed hero follows the sound of geese calling through a forest, and sees two women bathing in a lake, the younger of whom accepts his proposal of marriage. The elder sister dons her goose-skin and flies away; the younger sister is left heartsick. The hero is revealed to be “the headman’s son” (36), but his social status does not make his bride happy. In time she flies away, landing “beyond the point at the edge of town” (36). She returns, but remains unhappy: “soon his wife lay down beside him, cold” (37). When a famine afflicts the village, geese bring food, which the goose-bride describes as gifts from her father. But when she is affronted by a villager’s remark she leaves again, and both husband and wife are saddened.
The headman’s son proceeds to search for his wife. Equipped with supplies and advice from an “old man” (38), he follows her trail. He encounters Mouse Woman, who disguises him in the skin of a mouse, conferring wisdom, and other mysterious figures, including a black bear with no claws, a strange creature called Stickwalking Spirit-Being, and “two men, old and fat” (43). The hero, who has, in the skin of the mouse, ascended a pole and entered “the skyworld” (52), comes to his wife’s village, where, in a notable reversal, he learns that she is the headman’s daughter. They live there “for a time” as “man and wife” (44) until he grows unhappy and the raven is called upon to carry him back to his father’s village:
He [the raven] did as he said.
When he grew tired,
he let himself fall
down through the clouds with him [the headman’s son]
and dropped him onto a shoal exposed by the tide.
« Hwuuu! What a load I have carried. »
Becoming a gull, he [the hero] squawked and went on squawking.
This is where it ends. (45)
And so the poem does indeed end. The transformation of the hero from hunter to bird is complete, while the meaning of the narrative remains to be pondered.
Bringhurst offers a detailed explication of the poem in the second chapter of A Story as Sharp as a Knife (“Spoken Music,” 51–63). His commentary is structural, philological, and comparative. To throw into relief aspects of Ghandl’s poem, he includes a Yukaghir story told by Ekaterina Rumyantsev to Vladimir Bogoraz in 1896 in Siberia. Without Bringhurst’s assistance, or other sources of information about Haida culture and commentaries on the story, many readers will surely be left with questions about Ghandl’s narrative, which is elliptical, fast-moving, and seemingly free of extraneous detail. Nonetheless some social and moral lessons can be perceived. Neither the goose-woman nor the headman’s son can live in the other’s world for long; familial ties bind tightly; home exerts a powerful pull; and desire constantly exceeds possibility. The poem suggests that although transformation is an ever-present likelihood, humans and geese alike must live according to the strictures of their natures. Therein lies the poem’s “human poignancy” (58; cf. 55): the love between bride and groom is defeated by the inalienable conditions of human and anserine existence. Such lessons are clear. Equally apparent, even in English, are the numerical and fractal patterns, symmetries, and “thematic echoes” (56) that structure the poem. The importance of patterns is conspicuous even in the first lines:
There was a child of good family, they say.
He wore two marten-skin blankets.
After he took up the shooting of birds,
he went inland, uphill from the village, they say. (34)
The repetition of the quotative (“they say”) frames the introductory passage. It emphasizes the familiar, mythical dimension of the poem, and stands in contrast to the absence of the quotative in the last lines of the translation, which concludes more decisively than it begins: “This is where it ends” (45). The first and fourth lines have four strong stresses each in the phrases before the quotatives, further creating the impression of symmetry.
As the poem unfolds, it emerges that other patterns have been signalled. The theme of dressing in the habit of other creatures is introduced immediately by the reference to “marten-skin blankets” (34), while motifs of death and travel are announced by the details supplied to describe the hero. His direction of travel – “uphill from the village” – hints at his later voyage into the sky (34). The headman’s son is a hunter, and this ordinary yet vital vocation leads him on an adventure with dire consequences. He hears “geese calling” in the next passage (34), at which point he falls in love with his intended prey: he is doubly seduced, and the story appears to warn that although hunting for sustenance and falling in love are inescapable aspects of life, they are accompanied by dangers. Hunters and lovers alike must take care, for desire has repercussions. The marten-skin blankets reappear some thirty lines later when the hero gives the younger of the goose-women one of his blankets; he cloaks her in his garb in what may be taken as an image both of generosity and love, on one hand, and, on the other, of the assumption of an impossible identity. The figures in the poem are, as we say in English, comfortable in their own skins, but not in those of others.
If such themes and teachings are intelligible, the stylistic aspects of Bringhurst’s translation, especially at the level of lexis, are more difficult to investigate. I hesitate to place much semantic emphasis on the formal details of the English text, for without knowledge of the Haida language I cannot assess with much accuracy how carefully Bringhurst has followed the written record of Ghandl’s oral text.26 Yet as a work in English the translation is notable for its verbal intricacy. In one section of the poem, an eagle is “perched” near the river (42). In the lines that follow directly, a heron is “perched on the opposite bank” and a kingfisher is “perched upstream.” Eight lines later the rhyming verb “lurched” is used – “half of a person [Stickwalking Spirit-Being] lurched by, / leaning himself on a fishing spear” (42). The aural effect is a function of Bringhurst’s stylistic choices, and one result of the pattern (perched/perched/perched/lurched) is that the birdlike quality of the “half of a person” is made especially evident. He is a fisher, like the heron and kingfisher, and his “fishing spear” is an equivalent of their beaks. “To perch” is a verb of stasis while “to lurch” is a verb of movement, yet the rhyme links in sound words that have opposing meanings. While such details are part of the poem in English, they are not, however, part of the Haida poem that begins “Ll gidaagang wansuuga. / Kkuxu gyaa’at gutgu lla giistingdyas” (34). The same can be said of the strong alliteration and consonance of Bringhurst’s translations, of his marked but variable rhythms, and of his patterning of end-stopped and enjambed lines: these integral elements of the poem in English are not Ghandl’s inventions. Any work in translation requires critics who are versed in philology of the source language, and who can guide lay readers through the version in the target language. Bringhurst’s trilogy demands and deserves commentators with expertise in Haida. But his conviction that the oral texts are superb works of literature will be tested by most readers largely through the experience of reading the English poetry as poetry; the interpenetrating parts of the translation’s whole must all therefore receive due consideration.
Bringhurst deftly unveils the poem’s thematic and verbal patterns in his commentary (51–7), and describes ways in which he has found solutions, at times imperfect (56), to the problems of representing in English particular qualities of the Haida language. He occupies the role of guide as well as translator, showing a way through a text that remains enigmatic to the monolingual reader, for whom plot, setting, and character will likely be easier to grasp than the “verbal echoes” that are essential to the poem’s meaning and that, as Bringhurst notes, paraphrases cannot evoke (56). He describes Ghandl’s oral poem as “a vision painted indelibly in the air with words,” and compares it to “the paintings of Rembrandt and Velázquez” and “the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart” (63). The parallel is daunting: who would venture to write about Mozart without extensive musicological training, or about Rembrandt without a thorough understanding of painterly techniques? But of course one aim of translation is to make the foreign intelligible; and critics routinely write about literary works in translation out of necessity. A partial view of another world is preferable to none at all. The story about transformations is effective at the beginning of A Story as Sharp as a Knife partly because of the familiarity of the narrative: as a version of the Swan Maiden tale, it will not be found utterly outlandish by newcomers to the world of Ghandl and Skaay. It also provides a lesson about translation: when beings are transformed into other creatures, they remain recognizable as themselves. The hunter at the end of Ghandl’s story has become a gull, whose “squawking” (45) echoes the calling of the geese at the beginning; his descent is a reversal of the ascent of the goose-sister (35). The images, like many others in the poem, suggest the duality of resemblance and difference. And this duality is surely also linked to translation, in which two texts are at once dissimilar and the same. Ghandl’s poem illustrates Bringhurst’s characterization of the aesthetics of Haida literature, and introduces some of its recurring figures: ravens, gulls, loons, eagles, herons, black bears, salmon. It also allows for speculation into the translator’s role as insider and outsider both, and even as the hunter whose quest ends with a fall to earth, who enters the skyworld but cannot remain there. In the final lines, he is left in the in-between world of the “shoal exposed by the tide” (45), where there is nothing left to do but squawk.
The central claim of A Story as Sharp as a Knife – that the oral stories are in fact poetry, and that the storytellers are excellent poets – is tied to the reception of the books, which attracted, upon their publication, charges of cultural appropriation and linguistic incompetence. The opprobrium received by the trilogy may in retrospect appear to belong to a particularly heated political moment in the Canadian literary world, and to have less to do with Bringhurst’s books themselves than with the temper of the time. Much of the initial response to A Story as Sharp as a Knife was in fact enthusiastic; Bringhurst wrote to Scott McIntyre that he was “pleased” by Mark Abley’s “review in the [Montreal] Gazette” and that he expected a sensitive review from Hugh Brody in the National Post.27 The volume was praised by W.H. New as “a major work of retrieval, and one of the year’s most powerful books” (“Re-Collecting” 183). But in some Canadian newspapers and on CBC radio, a very public controversy was staged in which Bringhurst was accused of having acted improperly and insensitively. Some of his critics were Haida; others were not. Certain academic and literary commentators were stern in expressing their distaste. Wendy Wickwire’s review of A Story as Sharp as a Knife alluded to the objections of John Enrico and “many Haida”; suggested that Bringhurst “angered many specialized readers familiar with his source materials”; and proposed that a “rigorous prepublication review by linguists and the Haida people might have helped Bringhurst produce a book with less self-promotion and more substance” (199).28 The most damning passage concerned what Wickwire took to be Bringhurst’s wilful, even violent, romanticization of Haida Gwaii:
To reinforce his argument that his sources were classical works similar to our Renaissance treasures, Bringhurst emphasizes their ancient qualities. These great “mythtellers” were not really of the present; they were relics of a distant and wonderful past. There is little hint in either the text or the visual materials that his sources were Anglicans, fishermen, and cannery workers with common English names such as Henry Moody, Walter McGregor, and Abraham Jones. Nor is there any indication that these men had never known a life without Europeans and that their lifestyles were typical of rural B.C. residents of that period. On the contrary, the characters in Bringhurst’s project are mythtellers named Skaay, Daxhiigang, and Ghandl who supposedly lived in a world of totem poles and longhouses. With a deft piece of reconstruction (and obliteration), he removed them from the early 20th century and instead cast them as representatives of a far-off, exotic, and meaningful past. (199)29
Public debate about A Story as Sharp as a Knife was relatively short-lived, but reviews of Nine Visits to the Mythworld and Being in Being returned to the question of the propriety of Bringhurst’s translations. Steven Engler wrote in 2002, for example, that “This second volume [Nine Visits to the Mythworld] has the same beauty yet is liable to the same criticisms as the first. Bringhurst has been accused of appropriating Haida voices and stories without due respect or consultation” (89). He also noted that Bringhurst “has not made a point of travelling to Haida Gwaii and consulting with elders” (89). (He later moderated his evaluation [Engler et al. 314n1]; it is a misreading, as he has noted, to suggest that the translations were produced in absolute isolation from Haida Gwaii.) Brian Thom deemed Bringhurst’s books “an excellent presentation of Haida history and oral narratives,” but warned that “in excluding Haida people from the process Bringhurst has alienated one of his most important audiences” (15; see 23n8 for a useful list of journalistic accounts of A Story as Sharp as a Knife). These few examples illustrate what has been the tendency for critical discussion of Bringhurst’s works to become at least somewhat antagonistic.30
What remains, now that the initial praise and censure have faded if not disappeared from view, is for the translations to be examined at length in the manner for which the translator has called: they have yet to be studied widely as literary works, and to dwell only on the circumstances of the books’ creation and reception is surely to miss the coastal temperate rainforest for the Sitka spruces and Douglas-firs. At the beginning of this essay I suggested that A Story as Sharp as a Knife is an expression of a vision of humanistic inquiry. Bringhurst’s works assert repeatedly that literature in North America is older, more diverse, and more sophisticated than is often acknowledged. Studies of Canadian literature and American literature are usually confined to written literature in English (and in Canada, French) – and in this domain there are many riches.31 But A Story as Sharp as a Knife shows what is possible for literary studies in a different vein; and not only for criticism, but for history and philology too. Whether the Haida translations and Bringhurst’s claims on the poets’ behalf will be broadly examined is still to be seen. Bringhurst is not alone in his pursuit of a comparative, pluriform literary criticism, and his translations are not without their compeers, but the scale of his project of translation and commentary is nonetheless rare and impressive. The forceful case that he makes for the magnificence of Haida literature may in time entice dedicated readers. The translations are an indispensable guide not only to Haida literature, but also to the borderlands where myth, history, and poetry converge. They are a testament to the continuities between these categories, and, like much of Bringhurst’s writing, a demonstration of the belief that connection is a fundamental and profoundly meaningful characteristic of the world. At the land’s end is the ocean’s beginning, and far across the water there is land again.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funds that made possible the research for this essay. The copyrights to unpublished materials by Robert Bringhurst and Scott McIntyre are held by the respective authors, whom I thank for their assistance.
1 Lowell: Imitations xiii; cf. Lowell, Collected 196. McIntyre: from a letter (6 Jan. 1999) to Bringhurst (Robert Bringhurst Fonds, Acc. 2000-01, Box 17, File 3: “Knife – Design”). Bringhurst: from the “Preliminary Note” to “Arrogations,” a collection of translations of works in several languages (Acc. 1988-01, Box 16, File: “Translations n.d.”). This essay draws upon documents held by Library and Archives Canada in the Robert Bringhurst Fonds (LMS-0144). Archival materials are identified by accession date, box number, file number, and, on first reference, a file name.
2 My first sentences are pilfered from the concluding paragraph (225) of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” from Dubliners (1914), in the spirit of Bringhurst’s references to some of the canonical figures of modernism (see, e.g., Story 113, 364, 365, 494n13) – and more importantly to evoke links between imagined Western (and sometimes Elysian) places. Siigaay: see Bringhurst, Story 487n22. Hecate: cf. Hesiod, Theogony ll. 411ff. (Bringhurst refers to Hesiod; see Story 242, 297). “Haida Gwaii” became the official name in 2010; a governmental announcement to this effect was made in late 2009. See Story 443n2. The Haida name and the English have coexisted for some time, and Bringhurst has used both in various works. The name is sometimes rendered as “Haida Gwaay.”
3 Subsequent page numbers correspond, unless otherwise noted, to the 2011 edition of A Story as Sharp as a Knife. Qqaygaang (myths) are distinguished (Story 200–3) from qqayaagaang (“traditional stories of families or lineages” [201]) and gyaahlghalang (“historical or personal accounts of adventures or notable events” [201]).
4 The subtitle of Being in Being is sometimes given as The Collected Works of a Master Haida Mythteller; the dust jacket, title page, publishers’ catalogues, and lists of the author’s publications variously use one subtitle or the other. The three volumes were issued as a boxed set in 2002. They were published in the United States by the University of Nebraska Press. A Story as Sharp as a Knife was published in paperback in 2000 and reprinted with corrections in 2002. A second edition was published in paperback by Douglas & McIntyre in 2011. It contains a new preface (10–12), dated 8 Oct. 2010 (12), and a “Political Afterword” (419–24). The essential structure of the book – a prologue and twenty-two chapters – is retained. The six appendices in the first edition are collapsed into three in the second. Minor changes occur throughout the volume. A limited edition of a section (§3.3) of Skaay’s Qquuna Cycle was published by Russell Maret in 2007 as Siixha/ Floating Overhead. Like many of Bringhurst’s publications, it is a rare and beautiful object, but it has philological importance as well as aesthetic value: the particular text is published in Haida as well as in English for the first time (see the Translator’s Note). The translation is reprinted from Being in Being “with the translator’s latest revisions” (n.pag.).
5 Bringhurst contributed several substantial entries, for example, to the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002), edited by W.H. New, including those for Ghandl (432–3), Skaay (1051–2), Haida Oral Literature (464–7), and Bill Reid (953–4) (see Bringhurst, Everywhere 345). The Encyclopedia is included in my list of works cited, but to conserve space I have not listed each of Bringhurst’s entries separately.
6 “Finding Home” is the apt title of an essay by Bringhurst about Reid (see Tree 277–98).
7 “Geographical stage”: in The Way of the Masks (La Voie des masques, 1979), Claude Lévi-Strauss described the Northwest Coast as “a stage some two thousand kilometers wide and perhaps three to four hundred kilometers deep, along whose entire stretch the actors of a play for which we do not have the script have left their footprints” (228). The characterization is memorable if somewhat inaccurate.
8 Cf. Swanton, Contributions 9. On Swanton’s “Notes,” see Bringhurst, Story 460, 467, 525.
9 Kenneth Lincoln provides a succinct description of Hymes’s methods, which illuminate Bringhurst’s aims and techniques:
Hymes returns to opaque ethnological texts, essentially mistranslated by the experts half a century ago, with a freshly reconstructive science of linguistics. His anthropology encompasses direct field work, salvage from BAE reports, and complicated structural analyses; all this is premised on hearing the original language, as a poet would insist, before attempting any translation. Hymes reproduces Native American oral literatures as literature in their own contexts, not as antiquated or quaint folklore. His own work has been primarily with retranslations of Pacific northwest verse-texts, first transcribed by [Franz] Boas and [Edward] Sapir, and he has discovered stanzaic patterns of measured verse where earlier translators heard only rough prose. (87)
Hymes: see Bringhurst, Story 15, 494n14, 495n15, 496n2; Tree 206–56. Parry and Lord: see Bringhurst, Story 225, 444n7, 494n12, 496n2. Lévi-Strauss: see Bringhurst, Story 15–16. On Boas and Lévi-Strauss, see Bringhurst in Engler et al. 303. Bringhurst’s methods have other antecedents, of course. Sergei Kan writes, for instance, that “One of the major strengths of the Tlingit Indians of Alaska [by Fr. Anatolii Kamenskii, 1906] was its historical dimension. Unlike such Boasians as Swanton and [Ronald] Olson, Kamenskii described the Tlingit culture of a particular period – the end of the nineteenth century – rather than presenting an historical account of a ‘memory culture’” (in Kamenskii 15).
10 On cultural appropriation, see Bringhurst in Engler et al. 303–4, and Bringhurst, Story 11–12, 419–24.
11 Bringhurst also notes a Nuu-chah-nulth version told on Vancouver Island to Edward Sapir in 1913, “probably” by Saayaach’apis (Story 495n2). Terry Glavin explicates the “maxim” in his review of Bringhurst’s trilogy (181): “A story, too, can be as sharp as a knife. It might wound, or reveal what only a knife will disclose below the surface of a thing, or it might puncture old ideas, some fatally” (181–2). Bringhurst includes Wilson Duff’s well-known essay, “The World Is as Sharp as a Knife: Meaning in Northern Northwest Coast Art,” in his bibliography (Story 508). The proverb supplied the title for a collection of essays, The World Is as Sharp as a Knife: An Anthology in Honour of Wilson Duff (1981), edited by Donald N. Abbott (see Story 501). Duff committed suicide in 1976, a fact that lends a certain poignancy to Bringhurst’s adaptation of the proverb. See Bringhurst, Tree 278.
12 As Bringhurst notes (Story 496n3 [ch. 20]), Swanton published this story in Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida (37).
13 Cf. Swanton, Contributions 193–4.
14 “Laß dir Alles geschehn”: “let everything / happen to you (88).”
15 The thesis was titled “Carmina Propria et Opuscula Translata”: i.e., “My own songs and small works in translation.” “Propria” possibly also has the sense of “fitting” or “proper” – the necessary poems.
16 A note indicated that “City of Mirage” is “based closely on Sayyab’s Arabic” (Bergschrund 7).
17 Hamill co-founded Copper Canyon Press in 1972. The press published the American editions of Bringhurst’s The Beauty of the Weapons (1985), Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1987), and Selected Poems (2011).
18 Imitations, first published in 1961 (several editions followed; see Lowell, Collected 1047), has been lambasted for its inaccuracies. It has been a matter of critical disagreement whether the poems are truly translations or rather, in Burton Raffel’s phrase, “a kind of superior poetic cannibalism” (128). “‘Ring right’”: a similar statement in Lowell’s introduction – “I have tried to write alive English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America” (xi) – echoes Dryden in his translation of the Aeneid: “I have endeavour’d to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age” (330–1; see Lowell, Collected 1047). Bringhurst makes a similar claim in writing about “The Stonecutter’s Horses” (Selected 65–71), his poem in the voice of Petrarch that hovers between a translation and a re-imagining of the Italian’s last will and testament: “Petrarca is made to sound,” Bringhurst notes, “as though he had just been hiking the Siskiyous, which straddle the Oregon/California line” (Pieces 100).
19 From the biographical note in the “proposed front flap copy” that accompanied a letter (27 Jan. 1999) from McIntyre to Bringhurst (Acc. 2000-01, Box 17, File 2). Compare the “Translator’s Note” in Siixha/Floating Overhead: “I started studying Skaay’s poems – retranscribing them into a simpler Haida orthography and translating them into English – in the 1980s, then found myself writing a book about them” (n.pag.). In the “Preface to the Second Edition” of A Story as Sharp as a Knife, Bringhurst makes a similar observation: “I had not gone far with my translations before I also started work on what I hoped would be a short introductory essay. When the introduction reached five hundred pages, I understood that it would have to be a volume in itself” (Story 11). He also notes that he “began to read . . . Swanton’s English prose translations in the 1970s” (10); he gives “the late 1980s” as the point by which he was reading Haida literature in the original (“with difficulty”). Cf. Engler et al. 302. A biographical note on the cover of The Beauty of the Weapons states that “Since 1973 he has lived in the British Columbia Coast Mountains and on Vancouver Harbour.” The “Prefatory Note” in that volume concludes with a location and date: “Garibaldi, British Columbia / 1982” (8). Cf. Bringhurst, “Fast” 120: “For most of a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, I lived on Bowen Island, in the mouth of Howe Sound, on the southern coast of British Columbia.”
20 See Bringhurst in Engler et al. 309; and Bringhurst, Everywhere 83–4.
21 The curriculum vitae included in the thesis indicates that Bringhurst was “Instructor in Arabic” at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, in 1966–67 (CV-2). Cf. Bringhurst, Story 10: “I once made my living as a translator from Arabic.”
22 Cf. Bringhurst on qqayaagaang as “deeds of land in narrative form” (Story 201).
23 The reference to the potlatch is geographically specific, but the reprobation applies generally to North America. Bringhurst has also edited and translated oral texts from North American languages spoken beyond the Pacific coast – Navajo, for instance (Everywhere 284–92, 293–328).
24 Letters between Bringhurst and the staff of Douglas & McIntyre and Friesens in January, February, March, and April 1999 attest to the complexity of designing and printing A Story as Sharp as a Knife (Acc. 2000-01, Box 17, File 3). “Revised”: see, e.g., the drafts of “One They Gave Away,” by John Sky (i.e., Skaay), dated Oct. 1991 (Acc. 2000-01, Box 19, File 4 – “Being w/in Being Draft mss.”). “Concern”: memorandum (22 Mar. 1999) from Bringhurst to Friesens (Acc. 2000-01, Box 17, File 3).
25 Letter (7 Jan. 1999) from Bringhurst to Saeko Usukawa (Acc. 2000-01, Box 17, File 3). In the second edition of A Story as Sharp as a Knife, the cataloguing information is omitted. See Bringhurst in Engler et al. 303.
26 John Enrico’s Haida Syntax (2 vols., 2003) and Haida Dictionary: Skidegate, Masset, and Alaskan Dialects (2 vols., 2005), which draw upon Swanton’s works, are “impressive resources,” as Bringhurst notes (Story 11; cf. 432–4); they are helpful even to readers whose knowledge of the language is negligible. The extensive bibliography in A Story as Sharp as a Knife ([1999] 493–516, [2011] 501–26) is a useful guide for students of the Haida world.
27 Letter (11 Apr. 1999) from Bringhurst to McIntyre (Acc. 2000-01, Box 17, File 3).
28 Glavin notes Wickwire’s “attack” in his review, and quotes Bringhurst in response to “Adverse judgments in the academic press”: “‘It’s like an infection, and it’s still there,’ Bringhurst observed in a recent conversation. ‘I don’t expect it will go away in my lifetime. I have violated protocol on every front. I have no PhD. I have no faculty position. I did not ask permission from the Haida’” (183). Cf. Bringhurst on “privately held academic and professional domains” (Story 11–12).
29 Wickwire is herself a recorder of oral literature. Her volumes of the oral works of Harry Robinson (1900–1990) are highly regarded: Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989; 2nd ed. [“revised printing”] 2004), Nature Power: The Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (1992; 2nd ed. 2004), and Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory (2005).
30 The reviews of Being in Being by Richard Dauenhauer and Anthony K. Webster are instructive. Dauenhauer concentrates on the experience of reading the translations – “To be perfectly honest, I found entering the Skaay works tough-going and discouraging” (159) – and concludes with praise for translators of Haida oral poetry: “Whatever errors either Robert Bringhurst or John Enrico may have made (or are accused of having made), by omission or commission, are far eclipsed by the gift of marvelous translation” (159). Webster discusses Bringhurst’s methods in relation to those of Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock (263–4); he notes that A Story as Sharp as a Knife was “controversial” (263) and is “problematic” (264). The review by Hymes of the Haida trilogy is a brief but important statement, a richly suggestive and technically astute account of the translations. He is sympathetic to Bringhurst’s ambitions, and complimentary: “This trilogy should become a classic reference point” (750); he also expresses disagreement with Bringhurst’s characterization of Alfred Kroeber’s ethnography (748) and objects, albeit mildly, to the placement of quotative markers (750). He is diplomatic in his reference to the “intense objections” to which Bringhurst has been subjected (748). Hymes’s review is perhaps most valuable for its discussion of such vexed terms as “poetry,” “verse,” “metre,” and “lines” (749–50). Terry Glavin’s comprehensive review of the trilogy is another nuanced treatment; an admiring reader, he is sensitive to its literary and political complexities. J. Edward Chamberlin’s references to Bringhurst’s translations are consistently insightful (see, e.g., “‘Corn’” 83, 88, and Living 15, 17). Among the studies of Bringhurst’s trilogy are two essays of my own. In the first I attempted to describe the reception of A Story as Sharp as a Knife and to explicate Bringhurst’s methods and stated aims. In the second essay, I tried to place the controversy about cultural appropriation in the context of divergent opinions in Canadian letters about who is considered to have permission to write about culturally sensitive material, and to suggest a perhaps irresolvable tension between a romantic view of the artist as autonomous creator and a view of the artist as bound by affiliations and responsibilities to culture and community.
31 Bringhurst makes similar points in “The Critic in the Rain” (Everywhere 258–66). On the “relative absence” of Indigenous literatures from the academic discipline of comparative literature, see Chamberlin, “‘Corn’” 69–73.
Bradley, Nicholas. “Remembering Offence: Robert Bringhurst and the Ethical Challenge of Cultural Appropriation.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76.3 (2007): 890–912.
– “‘We Who Have Traded Our Voices for Words’: Poetry, Performance, and the Printed Word in Robert Bringhurst’s Translations from Haida.” Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (2004): 140–66.
Bringhurst, Robert. “Aeschylus and Mrs. Lembke.” Contemporary Literature in Translation 23 (Spring 1976): 4–8.
– The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–82. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982.
– Bergschrund. Delta, British Columbia: Sono Nis, 1975.
– “Carmina Propria et Opuscula Translata.” MFA Thesis. University of British Columbia, 1975.
– The Elements of Typographic Style. 3rd ed. Point Roberts, Washington: Hartley & Marks, 2004.
– Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2007.
– “Fast Drumming Ground.” Mānoa 22.2 (2010): 120–9.
– First Meditation on Time. Vernon, British Columbia: Greenboathouse, 2008.
– “How the Sunlight Gets Where It’s Going.” University of Toronto Quarterly 81.1 (Winter 2012): 88–9.
– Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986.
– Robert Bringhurst Fonds. Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa). LMS-0144.
– Selected Poems. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2009.
– A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999. 2nd ed. 2011.
– “Translator’s Note.” Skaay, Siixha n.pag.
– The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2006.
– Tzuhalem’s Mountain: A Sonata in Three Movements. Lantzville, British Columbia: Oolichan, 1982.
Chamberlin, J. Edward. “‘The corn people have a song too. It is very good’: On Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 21.3 (Fall 2009): 66–89.
– Living Language and Dead Reckoning: Navigating Oral and Written Traditions. Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2006.
Dauenhauer, Richard. Rev. of Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, by Skaay, ed. and trans. Robert Bringhurst. World Literature Today 77.1 (Apr.–June 2003): 159.
Dryden, John. Poems: The Works of Virgil in English, 1697. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing, eds. Vol. 5 of The Works of John Dryden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Engler, Steven. Rev. of Nine Visits to the Mythworld, by Ghandl, ed. and trans. Robert Bringhurst. Religious Studies Review 28.1 (Jan. 2002): 88–9.
–, Susan Bassnett, Robert Bringhurst, and Susan M. DiGiacomo. “Consider Translation: A Roundtable Discussion.” 2004. Religious Studies Review 33.4 (Oct. 2007): 299–316.
Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas. Nine Visits to the Mythworld. Robert Bringhurst, ed. and trans. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000.
Glavin, Terry. Rev. of Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, by Robert Bringhurst. BC Studies 138/139 (Summer/Autumn 2003): 181–4.
Hamill, Sam. Rev. of The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–82, by Robert Bringhurst. Western American Literature 18.2 (Fall 1983): 187–9.
Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Catherine M. Schlegel and Henry Weinfield, trans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Hymes, Dell. Rev. of A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, by Robert Bringhurst; Nine Visits to the Mythworld, by Ghandl, ed. and trans. Bringhurst; and Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, by Skaay, ed. and trans. Bringhurst. Language in Society 32.5 (2003): 747–51.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. London: Penguin, 1992.
Kamenskii, Anatolii. Tlingit Indians of Alaska. 1906. Sergei Kan, trans. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1985.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Way of the Masks. Sylvia Modelski, trans. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982; and Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1982.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Rev. of “In vain I tried to tell you”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, by Dell Hymes. MELUS 10.4 (Winter 1983): 86–90.
Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, eds. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
– Imitations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961.
New, W. [William] H., ed. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
– “Re-Collecting 1999.” Canadian Literature 167 (Winter 2000): 176–87.
Raffel, Burton. The Art of Translating Poetry. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.
Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. Robert Bringhurst, ed. and trans. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001.
– Siixha/Floating Overhead: The Qquuna Cycle §3.3. Robert Bringhurst, ed. and trans. [New York]: Russell Maret, 2007.
Swanton, John R. Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida. Leiden: Brill, 1905.
– “Notes Regarding My Ad[v]entures in Anthropology and with Anthropologists.” National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. MS 4651, “Swanton, JR – Notes regarding adventures . . . ca. 1944?”
Thom, Brian. “The Anthropology of Northwest Coast Oral Traditions.” Arctic Anthropology 40.1 (2003): 1–28.
Webster, Anthony K. Rev. of Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, by Skaay, ed. and trans. Robert Bringhurst. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13.2 (Dec. 2003): 263–4.
Wickwire, Wendy. Rev. of A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, by Robert Bringhurst. Pacific Northwest Quarterly 93.4 (Fall 2002): 199.