Fundamentally serious: closing remarks

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “a pu travailler en étroite collaboration avec [les Indiens et les Esquimaux] alors qu’il était à l’emploi du ministère des Affaires indiennes et du nord canadien. Durant cette période, il a recueilli des contes folkloriques esquimaux et s’est efforcé d’en livrer une traduction aussi fidèle que possible à la version originale. Le but principal des histoires indiennes et esquimaudes, nous dit-il, est d’amuser et de divertir. James McNeill encouragea la publication du premier roman dans la langue esquimaude, Le harpon du chasseur par Markoosie”.

2 Can one seriously, in 2024, claim specialization in a literature whose language one has not studied? Indigenous languages and literatures should be no exception, and yet the problem is quite widespread.

3 In paraphrasing our arguments, their response uses some striking language: “treason”, “slander”, “besmirch”, and “bastardize” (there is also the straw man argument that Markoosie never “despised” the English version of his text). Such a constellation of highly emotive terms cannot help but make their criticism sound personal, which perhaps it is – the world of Montreal-based francophone translators and scholars interested in Indigenous writing is a small one.

4 Lemieux and Roy are wrong when they write that “[t]he way of the people with big eyebrows” is a more literal translation of qallunaatitut. “Person with big eyebrows” is only an uncertain etymology of the noun base qallunaaq. Another common but false claim is that it means “eyebrow-belly” (qallu-naaq).

5 “[I]l a écrit son texte en inuktitut et l’a lui-même traduit en anglais. Cet aspect montre bien que son but était de diffuser largement son récit”.

6 On a not unrelated note, it is our understanding that Carcelen-Estrada’s positing of the continued existence of “Celtic-Iberian Indigenous languages” or the Shillipanu language is at best wishful thinking.

7 “Au Sénégal, le français, c’est comme qui dirait la langue du dimanche, une langue de cérémonie”, “quand j’écris en français, j’écris dans une langue sourde”, and “lorsqu’on écrit dans sa langue maternelle, on comble ce déficit de mélodie, de poésie qu’il y a lorsqu’on écrit dans une langue qu’on ne parle pas au quotidien”.

8 “Pratiquement donc, la langue des Inuit est un peu traitée comme une femme-objet à l’ancienne mode, à qui on dit: sois belle et tais-toi! On [en] vante la beauté, on cherche à préserver ce qui fait son charme, tout le monde lui voue – en surface tout au moins – un grand respect, mais on se comporte envers elle comme si elle ne pouvait pas jouer de rôle vraiment utile, comme si seul l’anglais – son puissant compagnon – était en mesure de contribuer vraiment au développement de l’Arctique et au progrès social de ses habitants”. Note that the interview with Diop cited above includes an audio clip of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o similarly commenting on how, across Africa, maternal languages have rarely been considered vehicles for knowledge.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Lacito (CNRS).

Notes on contributors

Valerie Henitiuk

Valerie Henitiuk is professor emerita at Concordia University of Edmonton and former director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, as well as former editor of Translation Studies. Her work on the translation of Inuit literature has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as was earlier research on European translations of Classical Japanese literature. Henitiuk’s recent publications include an article titled “A Healing Curve: The Poetry of Taqralik Partridge in Inuktitut Translation” (2022; done collaboratively with Marc-Antoine Mahieu).

Marc-Antoine Mahieu

Marc-Antoine Mahieu teaches Inuktitut language and linguistics at INALCO, Sorbonne Paris Cité. He is a member of LACITO (Languages and Cultures of Oral Tradition) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He is also adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval, and consultant for the Kativik School Board in Nunavik. His recent publications include an article titled “A Healing Curve: The Poetry of Taqralik Partridge in Inuktitut Translation” (2022; done collaboratively with Valerie Henitiuk).