Orality, literacy and the translator: A case study in Haida translation

ABSTRACT

This article integrates Venuti's approach to the status of the translator with Derrida's (post-)structural histology of the letter to address the paradox inherent in the mythic (re)production of Indigenous oral texts and the risk of cultural appropriation. The case study is of contentious translations of Haida narratives from the orators Ghandl and Skaay, both from Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the Canadian north-west coast, south of Alaska. These narratives were recorded, translated and published at the start of the last century and retranslated in 1995 and in 2000–01. The article examines the conditions under which retranslation can serve “narrative revitalization”: the rebirth of meaning through intersemiotic communities of interest. Texts (re)produce readers, and their languages reproduce speakers. The conclusion is that the translator's position on orality determines the conditions under which their work has been embraced or excoriated, suggesting that only dual-language text(ure)s permit adequate “contact” with the stories.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnopoetics
• Indigenous literatures
• intersemiotics
• orality and literacy
• translation theory
• animal studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Jasmine Spencer is a postdoctoral fellow studying Indigenous literatures and specializing in Dene/Athabaskan languages and literatures.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, I cite Bringhurst’s translations of Ghandl’s and Skaay’s stories with their names listed as the authors.

2. Reciprocity is not the same as a commodity exchange and may subvert it; as Vicente Rafael (1998, 135) writes of Tagalog and Spanish, dominant-language terms can become, in translation, a form of resistance. In Guujaaw’s (1995, viii) context, where the stories in Enrico’s books “represent incorporeal properties, valued above material wealth”, the reader is already called upon to reciprocate: “only a certain amount can be represented on a page. The rest is up to you.” The intangible cultural wealth and accompanying Haida protocols for sharing this wealth permit the formation of a generous form of debt: “After this, when you look upon the images associated with our culture, they might even wink at you.”

3. The means of production of texts can always be “reappropriated” in powerful and unexpected new ways by Indigenous artists and elders practising the ongoing and vital work of teaching and imagining. As Margery Fee (2000, 150) notes, storytellers such as Harry Robinson and those recorded by Julie Cruikshank (1998) “knew that ranching and storytelling were both labour, and that both produced value”. The question is always for whom. See also Abel (2013).

4. I acknowledge the difficulty of quoting Benjamin in translation, and of course this is a difficulty that must be noted throughout this article in relation to all the translated texts I work with: one cannot delimit Benjamin’s intended meanings, or the meanings of any translated work, and this difficulty is part of his power, and that of all such works. We cannot delimit, but we can, and I think must, retranslate.

5. At the same time, this instrumental approach, while affirming a historical source, is still inevitably interpretive even in pre-translation practices such as transcription: how narrowly to transcribe the phonological details of the language event, where to place lexical boundaries to form words and how to punctuate oral meaning on the page? As Giorgio Agamben (2006) notes in his critique of Euro-Western language philosophy, “grammatical and logical categories and grammatical and logical reflections are originally implicated one in the other, and thus they are inseparable … These categories are not properly either logical or grammatical, but they make possible every grammar and every logic, and, perhaps, every episteme in general” (20). See Maya Chacaby’s (2015, 4) incisive and vivid article on the “myth of benign translatability” for further thoughts on the effects of an aggressive grammatical and translatorial “treatment” for the language of the “Crippled Two-tongue”, the “one who don’t speak good English an’ don’t speak much Indian, ya know, eh?”. Guujaaw (1995, vii) identifies this same issue, while also affirming the value of the stories in written form, when he writes: “Open this box of treasures and know that our story has always been the spoken word, animated with subtleties and emotions that don’t translate into print.”

6. The pharmakon can be both poison and cure, and it is important to emphasize the uncanny, selective work of this conceptual “pesticide”.