Formatting, Literature, and Oral Traditions

Maria Caridad Casas
May 29th, 2005

A good six years ago now, I was relaxing on a Saturday morning, reading the Globe and Mail , when I came across a feature article about the alleged appropriation of traditional Haida narratives by Vancouver poet Robert Bringhurst. The writer, who was clearly in sympathy with the Haida, reported that the Haida felt that “he is mostly formatting existing translations … into a European-style verse that’s more palatable to white Canadians” (Weder C3). The wording of that accusation caught my attention, not just because of its technological cast, and not just because of the irony – as I later discovered, the verse, if palatable, is neither approachable nor seemingly European-style. It caught my attention because of the phrase “formatting… into verse”, which emphasized, at first glance, the visual difference between verse-poetry and prose. But it also hinted that there is alienation from European verse among the Haida at least, and I couldn’t help wondering what the difference is, in terms of cultural symbols, between European poetry and prose. Are some kinds of literature more objectionable, because more colonizing, or more representative of Europe, than others? Given that the narratives existed in both Haida language and English language, in performance and in writing, before Bringhurst’s version, what was the particular insult of European verse?

According to Greg Young-Ing, who was until recently the Managing Editor of Theytus Books, the Aboriginal publishing house in B.C., there have been similar complaints about the “formatting” of Harry Robinson’s stories in the Okanagan, transcribed by Wendy Wickwire. The complaint is presumably about Wickwire’s transcription rather than Robinson’s words or stories, since, as I confirmed with Young-Ing, it was the line breaks that were the problem. Again I had to wonder what the objection is to a page that looks and behaves like poetry as opposed to a page that looks and behaves like prose.

One way to further define the problem is to compare similar texts, so I prepared a working taxonomy of recent poetry written by and transcribed by both native and non-Native writers, arranged on a continuum. At one end of the continuum is some of Louise Halfe / Skydancer’s poetry. Halfe is Cree and French, raised in the Cree tradition; her second book of poetry was short-listed for the Governor General’s award -- and the Governor General’s award, culturally speaking, valorizes texts unequivocally as good literature. I present a few lines to show its visual nature:

i wonder if you could dell da govment
to make dem laws dat stop dat
whiteman from dakin our isistaawina [rituals]
cuz i dell you pope
i don’t dink you like it
if i dook you
gold cup and wine
(Bear Bones, 103)

Since this is meant as poetry in the European sense – the expression of an individual, internalized, never before produced, not meant to be rewritten by another – I think there can be no question that the line breaks are legitimate within a well-established European written-literary tradition.

Next on the continuum is Maria Campbell’s Stories of the Road Allowance People. Campbell is Metisse. In her introduction she tells us that she has been given permission to share the traditional stories with the reader; and that the stories have been paid for “by being a helper or servant to the teachers. I have also paid for the stories with gifts of blankets, tobacco and even a prize Arab stallion” (2). She thus establishes a very clear demarcation between some aspects of the European literary tradition and the Aboriginal – these are the expression of a group, externalized, produced many times before, and meant to be re-told, but only with permission and according to certain protocols.

There’s a further wrinkle, however, because the stories were told in Mitchif and Campbell translated them into “the dialect and rhythm.. of my father’s generation” (2). She is thus translating as well as transcribing. Campbell transcribes the stories like this:

Dem peoples dat go away to dem schools
an come back you know dey really suffer.
No matter how many stories we tell
we’ll never be able to tell
what dem schools dey done to dah peoples
an all dere relations.
(Stories, 92)

The legitimacy of these line-breaks could conceivably be called into question because Campbell is recording a tradition of verbal art, held communally. As far as I know, however, nobody has objected to Campbell’s formatting of Stories of the Road Allowance People.

Next is Wendy Wickwire’s transcription of Okanagan stories as told by Harry Robinson. Robinson learned the stories from his grandmother and other elders in Okanagan, but later in life started telling them in English rather than Okanagan because his native listeners often did not speak the indigenous language any longer. Robinson told the stories in English to Wickwire. According to Schorcht, there was quite a bit of manipulation of the stories, and Wickwire arranged the lines following Hymes’ ethnopoetic transcription procedures:

They were ready to eat.
They got ‘em cooked,
   and they make kind of a table
      and put the branches on the ground.
They they put the meat there.
And then they sitting there.

They were just ready to eat and somebody came.
They never see where he come from.
Just like if we could see somebody come,
   we’d say,
      “Here comes somebody.”
But this one here, they never see.

(Harry Robinson, Write It On Your Heart, comp. and ed. Wendy Wickwire, 177)

According to Young-Ing, as I said, some Okanagan people have objected to the formatting.
Finally, Bringhurst’s text, which is in fact a retranslation of an already-existing transcription and translation, and it therefore stands as only one of a number of written versions of the same performance. The narratives had been told in 1900-1901 by a Haida mythteller to an American ethnologist, who transcribed them in a phonetic alphabet and then in interlineal English translation (the translation was given to him by a bilingual Haida and later edited). Eighty years later, Bringhurst consulted the original transcription-translation and re-translated some of the texts; that is, he worked out aspects of the Haida language through the phonetic alphabet and created another translation. He also consulted at least two other prose versions of the original transcription. His version was published together with an extensive account of the narratives’ historical context, his translation philosophy, and scholarly notes. However, he did not consult any native Haida speakers, nor did he ask permission to re-translate or publish the stories. Here is what his version looks like:

At that moment he entered, they say.
He was a pretty one.
He’d been gambling.
He kept patting his face with cedarbark powder
and wiping it off.

He went straight to the lady.
He wormed his way instantly into her clothes.
He kept looking straight at her.
She glanced at him once,
and it lasted forever.
(Being in Being, 165)

The differences between this verse and the other three are fantastic, in the sense of disorienting and perhaps slightly grotesque. Some aspects of this verse are palatable to my European literary sensibility – the chivalric/romantic spiritual tradition in which a moment of romantic bonding transcends time and space (the action is inside a house where there are many people gathered); the compressed nugget of characterization for the man who enters; the class implications of the word “lady” and other echoes of the European eighteenth-century upper class, including the dandy who gambles for entertainment. But I am powerless to discern whether these are also appropriate for the Haida traditional context or characteristic of classical Haida literature. Bringhurst does give much information contextualizing these texts, which reinforces my general knowledge that traditional Haida Gwaii was a class society in which surplus wealth played an important cultural role.

But that is not the point. Or rather my own ignorance and powerlessness and my interpretation of this passage in the terms of my European cultural and historical context is precisely the point. Although Bringhurst is very careful to give as full a picture as possible of the context of these stories, and footnotes energetically whenever there is ambiguity about meanings or interpretations, it remains the case that I can only read this text within the circle of my cultural knowledge and experience.

And, to return to the concern about formatting that I began with, the main difference between the first three and the fourth is that the purpose of the line breaks in the first three is clearly to duplicate the rhythms of a speaker whereas the purpose of the line breaks in the fourth is also related to sound, but not to orality. That is, Bringhurst’s style is not markedly dialectal, though it is careful of sound effects. Neither is it easy to read aloud, as the others are [you can experiment by reading this passage aloud. It rather thuds for me.] It seems meant to be clearly and unequivocally a written verbal artistry.

Is this what is meant by a text formatted into a European-style verse to be more palatable to white Canadians? It seems, in some ways, to be exactly the opposite. Could the strangeness of this text be considered an affront by some Haida because it represents their verbal art as that strange? The irony then would be that, in his desire to create a translation as faithful as possible to the original, Bringhurst came up against a rejection of a “faithful” translation that was not familiar enough – not European enough – to present-day Haida readers.

Like the other verse-like texts, this text makes strange -- but on a different axis. Its very writerliness could be considered European-style, but to go very far with this equation gets us into the boggy ground of an Aboriginal=oral, European=written binary which rather stops the questions than opening them up. There is one aspect of this polarized cluster that might be useful, though, and that is the conjunction of literary and written. Literariness cannot be divorced from its history. I notice with interest that in Janice Acoose/Red Sky Woman’s Iskwewak, the term literature refers to the body of written imaginative work authored by Europeans and carrying out a project of ideological control of Aboriginal peoples (40). In the sense that all utterances position their speakers and hearers, this is true, although Acoose was referring more particularly to studies of stereotypes of the Indian or Indigene or Aboriginal carried out by Monkman or Goldie or Groening. Perhaps in the popular Haida mind, as in the popular Euro-Canadian mind, poetry and verse are typically literature, standing in for it as an easily identifiable synecdoche of a text’s literariness.

Krupat writes in an essay on the translation of Native American song and story that in the translation of Native North American verbal art,

[g]iven the very different structure of Native American languages from Indo-European languages..., and given the different assumptions and possibilities of oral and textual performance, one cannot help but sacrifice, in some measure, closeness to the original for a sense of “literariness”, or a sense of “literariness” for a sense of the actual structure and syntax of the original. (5)

He puts the term “literariness” in quotes: I interpret these quotation marks as a healthily relativistic interpretation of what literariness is. If I formulate that interpretation as: the literary is a specifically European notion of verbal art, then Krupat’s statement really means, when translating and transcribing, there is always a tension between the aesthetic norms of the original text and the aesthetic norms of the target audience. In this case, and in the Haida case, the aesthetic norms include the medium – whether verbal art is traditionally and in the most conservatively-held notions of a culture: written or oral.

A related objection to the juxtaposition of Native North American verbal art with the literary surfaces in a few references that I’ve come across. The first is a simple essay title: “The Imposition of Western Definitions of Literature on Indian Oral Traditions” in The Native in Literature edited by King, Calver and Hoy. Another reference is a small discussion of the position of Salishan linguist Anthony Mattina, who, according to Krupat, “resist[s] all claims that versified format is necessary for conveying the literariness of Indian narrations...” He quotes Mattina thus

Narratives on the printed page are museum artifacts, just as arrowheads in a museum case are spent projectiles... The understanding which readers gain from the script is in direct proportion to what they know about the tradition and the context of the text... Let the texts come forth, in whatever typographic arrangement the editor deems appropriate. (as qtd. in Krupat 18)

Guujaaw, the President of the Council of the Haida Nation, wrote an introduction to a written prose version of traditional Haida stories along similar lines: “Open this box and know that our story has always been the spoken word, animated with subtleties and emotions that don’t translate into print.... like songs, only a certain amount of information can be represented on a page. The rest is up to you... (vii-viii). The idea seems to be to distance the essence of the narratives from the medium of writing, because writing can only record a limited aspect of this verbal art.

In the European tradition, on the other hand, a literary text just is, in itself – it is itself, and not Mattina’s “spent projectile.” Mattina, according to Krupat, writes in “Red English, the English actually spoken by many contemporary Native American persons... I will not attempt to summarize Mattina’s persuasive defense of “Red English” translations as literarily valuable...” (18) — and here Krupat does not put “literary” in quotation marks, does not distance himself from the term, but inserts a footnote recommending Wickwire’s transcription of the storytelling of Harry Robinson (n. 23, p. 28).

This brings us full circle back to our continuum of four texts. I think it fair to say at this point that, in presenting oral narratives with line breaks, both Wickwire and Bringhurst, as perceived outsiders to the verbal art traditions they were conveying, ran a grave risk of invoking – in Bringhurst’s case quite deliberately – a European tradition of verbal art that is felt to be misrepresentative of the essence of North American verbal art. The difference between the two is that Wickwire was more clearly trying to recreate speech in writing, whereas Bringhurst was trying to bring the Haida verbal art tradition into forms of representation that are culturally embedded in much more complex and problematic ways.

Verbal art cuts close to the bone. In “How to write for the Other?”, Hodgson, who is of Plains Cree descent, explains the emotional effect of texts such as Bringhurst’s as “anger or hostility, that ...First Nation groups have experienced when non-Native authors have misinterpreted their history and their language, and who published books which the Native groups felt erased or distorted their culture's inheritance.”

Bringhurst follows the ethnopoetic practice of Hymes, who for decades has advocated the transcription of American Indian narratives as verse. Hymes is a poet as well as a linguist, and some of his verse transcriptions are in fact beautiful and intriguing, while also based on rigorous analysis of the grammatical and rhetorical structures of the original oral texts; but his practice is also advocacy, as is Bringhurst’s, for the “literariness” of Aboriginal verbal art. [Hymes’ work, however, is followed by enthusiasm by many people, and writers like Thomas King have endorsed his and Wickwire’s work.]

It would be a shame to criticize Bringhurst’s weird but beautiful translations on the grounds that they are inauthentic while ignoring the effects of a century of forced cultural assimilation on the present-day Haida. I think what’s at stake here is not authenticity, but relations of power refracted through cultural productions, relations that read Handle With Care. However, Bringhurst’s concern in much of his commentary on the translations is for accuracy based on a carefully cultivated notion of the original, including the nature of oral tradition, orality, and myth; and a sophisticated consideration of what should happen to the words of this type of text when they are transferred from speech to writing. The dual concern for authenticity in the discourse of both Bringhurst and the Haida objectors makes them run like steam engines in opposite directions on parallel tracks.

However, most of the sources Bringhurst depends on for his conceptual work are European anthropologists, mythologists, and ethnolinguists, and the ethnocentric fallacies in some of their work undermine the value of Bringhurst’s work for the Haida nation. Finally, Bringhurst’s work is fiercely scholarly, and scholarly knowledge is perhaps the least accessible type of knowledge there can be, in any culture, for reasons very similar to those that made Maria Campbell pay for her knowledge with gifts of blankets, tobacco and even a prize Arab stallion. The difference in their dissemination of very specialized knowledge brings us back again to the continuum of four texts, but of course on a number of levels that goes far beyond formatting.

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