‘Memory is so different now’: the translation and circulation of Inuit-Canadian literature in English and French^*

* This line is borrowed from Louis Tapardjuk, one of the founders of Igloolik Oral History Project (qtd. in Richler, 2006, p. 87). The IOHP aimed to preserve Inuit cultural traditions and knowledge through a total of 400 taped interviews with elders in the community, capturing knowledge that is at risk of disappearing forever following decades of colonialism.

ABSTRACT

Inuit, even more marginalized than the First Nations or Métis, settled along what is now northern Canada some 4000–6000 years ago. They have a centuries-long history of orature (legends, myths, songs, etc.), although literacy is a more recent arrival. Interest in this traditionally nomadic, socially complex, and richly imaginative culture has been increasing rapidly in the past few years, with the emergence of prize-winning films by Zacharias Kunuk and others; the second edition of Life Among the Qallunaat (the autobiography of Mini Freeman, a quadrilingual Inuk who worked as a translator in Ottawa for some 20 years); and the publication in 2013 of an English version of what has been called the first Inuktitut novel, first begun by a woman in the 1950s. This paper will examine a few recent developments in the present-day circulation of the traditions of one Canada’s no-longer-quite-so-invisible ‘invisible minorities,’ with a particular focus on Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, who has been referred to as ‘the accidental Inuit novelist’ (Martin, 2014).

KEYWORDS:

• Inuit culture
• Indigenous Canadian literature
• literary translation
• memory
• Sanaaq

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Valerie Henitiuk is Executive Director, Centre for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence, and Professor in the Department of English at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. She previously served as Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia (2007–13). Following a PhD in Comparative Literature in 2005 from the University of Alberta (Canada), she went on to conduct research at Columbia University in New York City, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellowship. Her research focuses primarily on Translation Studies, World Literature, Japanese Literature, and Women’s Writing. Dr. Henitiuk’s work has been published in journals such as the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, META, Translation Studies, and TTR, and in collected volumes such as Teaching World Literature (MLA, 2009), Thinking through Translation with Metaphors (St. Jerome, 2010), Translating Women (University of Ottawa Press, 2011), Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship (Monash University Publishing, 2012), and A Companion to Translation Studies (John Wiley & Sons, 2014). In addition to co-editing One Step towards the Sun: Short Stories by Women of Orissa for the Indian publisher Rupantar (2010), she has published the following books: Embodied Boundaries, on liminal metaphor in women’s writing in English, French and Japanese (Gateway Press, 2007); Worlding Sei Shônagon: The Pillow Book in Translation (University of Ottawa Press, 2011); and A Literature of Restitution, a co-edited volume of essays on W.G. Sebald (University of Manchester Press, 2014). She is also Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge journal Translation Studies. Major awards include the Kokugakuin University Visiting Researcher Prize (2002–3), the Izaak Walton Killam Scholarship and the Dorothy J. Killam Memorial Prize (2003), the Governor-General’s Gold Medal (2005), the inaugural SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Prize (2005), and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2010–11).

Notes

* This line is borrowed from Louis Tapardjuk, one of the founders of Igloolik Oral History Project (qtd. in Richler, 2006, p. 87). The IOHP aimed to preserve Inuit cultural traditions and knowledge through a total of 400 taped interviews with elders in the community, capturing knowledge that is at risk of disappearing forever following decades of colonialism.

1. As the co-editors explain:

Building on her career as an interpreter for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Aodla Freeman was able to make use of the memoir form as an instrument of translation, as her narrative weaves together inherited Inuit knowledge, a ‘reverse ethnographic’ account of her time in Ottawa and Hamilton, and reflections on the history and activity of the people of James Bay during a period of intense political and social change. (Rak et al., 2015, p. 262)

2. The project is currently limited to Inuit literature within Canada, but will later examine the Greenlandic context as well. As a circumpolar people, Inuit communities linked by a more or less common culture are located in four different countries: Canada, the United States, Russia and Greenland. Each geographic area has its own history of colonization. Of particular relevance is the fact that in Greenland, literature by and for Inuit was created much earlier and its circulation in both Kalaalisut and Danish has developed in ways very different from the Canadian context (see Ian Martin, 2013).

3. Mitiarjuk's name is sometimes (e.g. Nappaaluk 2002) listed as Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk or even Mitiarjuk Salomé Attasi Nappaaluk. Naming is a highly contentious topic in colonial and postcolonial Inuit culture, and has been comprehensively addressed from a ‘political onomastics’ approach (see, e.g., Alia, 2006). Traditionally, Inuit men and women used a single gender-neutral name. In the 1940s, the government of Canada assigned each Inuk a number, issuing identification disks not unlike dog tags; then, in the late 1960s, Inuit were forced to adopt surnames, often those of their father or grandfather.

4. For a more in-depth analysis of the particular journey this book has taken (and continues to take) in translation, from Inuktitut to English to French and now even to Hindi and Marathi, see Henitiuk, forthcoming.

5. As Paul Bandia reminds us,

Thanks to the influential work of scholars such as Alfred Lord […], Jack Goody […] and Walter Ong […], orality has shed its negative image as primitive, unwritten, non-literate and exotic, and grown into a major field of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary research including translation studies. (2015, p. 125)

6. The poem is titled ‘A Greenland Song’ in the table of contents, but ‘Greenland Ode’ inside.

7. Ostensibly located within the Global North, it's worth bearing in mind how much more the Indigenous peoples of Canada have in common with the Global South.

8. For a discussion of how syllabics and abugida interrelate, see Harvey, 2006, although Harvey’s conclusion is that Canadian syllabics are not in fact an abugida strictly speaking.

9. Translations, except where otherwise noted, are my own.

10. Phil James has also challenged this persistent myth. His parody, ‘The Eskimos' Hundred Words for Snow’, gives the (entirely fictitious) Inuktitut base of tla ‘snow’, going on to provide a long list of terms that include not only tlapa (‘powder snow’) or tlakringit (‘snow that is crusted on the surface’) but also hahatla (‘small packages of snow given as gag gifts’), mextla (‘snow used to make Eskimo margaritas’), tlanip (‘snow sold to Japanese tourists’), and depptla (‘a small snowball, preserved in Lucite, that had been handled by Johnny Depp’); see http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~smann/Humor/snow.txt, accessed 20 February 2016.

11. Note also Kate Bush's characteristically idiosyncratic song ‘50 Words for Snow’, performed as a duet with actor Stephen Fry (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Aytn3Fcu0, accessed 20 February 2016). This would appear to be the meme that will not die; for example, an early review of one of the two new Indian translations of Harpoon is titled ‘How Many Words does Marathi Have for Ice?’ (http://scroll.in/article/803453/translating-an-inuit-tale-how-many-words-does-marathi-have-for-ice; accessed 21 February 2016).

12. I have explored this issue in a very different context in my earlier work on the European ‘discovery’ of Japanese literature; see, e.g., Henitiuk, 2014.

13. This is a not uncommon theme. Another Inuit-Canadian author, Alice French, writes ruefully that ‘I did not commit to memory as I should have the many stories and legends that the older people had told us by word of mouth, because I thought we would always have them. I have often regretted my carelessness in taking them for granted’ (1991, p. 136).

14. For an examination of the importance of ‘translating women's silences’, see Henitiuk, 2015.