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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spooky and profound, July 9, 2006
This review is from: Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, Vol. 2) (Hardcover)
Robert Bringhurst devoted separate volumes to two great poets, Skaay (I'll leave out the lineage name) and Ghandl. Of the two, Ghandl is the easier. His poems are short, focused, intense and memorable. They're often eerie like nightfall on the water. But they're far more than entertainment. Like all real myths, they point to things that can't be stated outright; they teach us ways of finding ourselves in the world and recognizing the intricate weave of reciprocal forces that underpins what we think of as reality. The whole trilogy is eye-opening. Start anywhere; you'll probably end up with all three. And you'll be glad you did.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Diving Headfirst into the Mythworld, January 9, 2011
These nine narratives from the Haida mythteller, Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, are in a realm apart from ordinary myths and legends. Robert Bringhurst's fine translations are sensitive and elegant, allowing the voice of Ghandl to rise up from the page with full power.
In 1900, when the anthropologist/linguist John Swanton gathered these stories, Ghandl was about 50 years old. He was blind from one of the many epidemics that had ravaged the Northwest Coast, and living at Skidegate Mission. Ghandl dictated the texts--6 hours a day, 6 days a week, for about three weeks--to another Haida man, Henry Moody, who then helped Swanton to translate them to phonetics. Swanton eventually transcribed them into a running prose, but I can't imagine that his prose was anything like the poetic beauty of what appears in this book.
It is a difficult task to make the disparate elements of oral myths cohere and stand as written literature; often they read disjointedly and almost nonsensically. But here, they are aligned by an internal structure that gives them continuity, yet they are allowed enough breathing room so that the inexplicable can flourish.
Robert Bringhurst is a Canadian poet, professor and typographer who seems to have an unusually perceptive eye and ear. His respect and appreciation for these narratives is palpable. Ghandl's nuances, his sly elusions, his profound phrasing, his complex patterns of movement are all understood and protected. Best of all, Bringhurst, like Ghandl, doesn't distance himself from the Mythworld, and between the two of them the reader is plunged headfirst into the Numinous, without any "once upon a time" preambles or anthropological remove.
Ghandl's Mythworld is a visionary space, vibrant and contradictory, where the ordinary conventions that govern reality don't apply. Greater and grander laws are at work, and Ghandl conveys their mysterious operations with a matter-of-fact certainty. There is a sense that he is not outside the Mythworld and looking in; he is inside it as complicit witness. He's not describing anything remote or shadowy; he is present among the people and spirit beings and is awed, instructed and amused by their transformations and exploits.
Everything in the Mythworld is at once familiar and fantastic. In Ghandl's telling, the words he uses seem to be the only words possible, as they both activate and accompany the spirits beings. The words themselves are the manner by which these supernatural beings come alive. You would be hard-pressed to find, in modern literature, any writing so vital, expressing so much so sparingly.
This book demonstrates that great narratives, even if eroded by time and passed through many hands and processes, can endure with their powers intact. These nine tales are spellbinding.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haida Worldview, January 30, 2011
This review is from: Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, Vol. 2) (Hardcover)
In six months we visit the Haida Gwaii archipelago (Queen Charlotte Islands) for the first time. In preparation I'm reading all I can of its fierce and cultured native people; its troubled history; it's exquisitely powerful art; and its wild coasts. "Nine Visits to the Mythworld" permits a potent view into Haida myth-time, the time before humans as something separate from the world of transforming gods, creatures, and cosmic material. A world with porous levels: sky, sea, and land, and passable boundaries: horizon, cave-mouths, and tide-bands.
Through Bringhurst, Ghandl speaks in clear clauses that ring and cut like adze blows; spoken lines that call up images potent as any of Homer, Pound, or Williams:
* Smoke from village fires rising into the clouds like the teeth of a comb.
* Of mouse-woman: "She spoke with grace./ Her voice had big round eyes."
* Of an angry god: "Why are their spear points in your eyes?"
* Of an old woman flying: "Her wings were like dry branches./ She flew low./ She flew there crookedly./ She teetered through the air."
* Of a pivotal and very thin cord made from the "sinew of wrens."
These myths are chock-full of loyalty, revenge, and transformation; danger, death, and resurrection; sex, surrealism, violence, and fractal repetitions. This is the stuff of potent dreams.
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