Customer Reviews

Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Good mythtelling is poetry of the highest order, and it takes a poet to translate it. Robert Bringhurst's renderings of the verbal masterpieces of classical Haida storytellers are truly astounding, as it is his reconstruction of the facts surrounding their collection by American anthropologist John Swanton. As someone who works in the same field I must say that this book has been a great discovery for me. It is an example to follow, both in the style of the translations and in the wide range of the commentary.

There's no reason to withhold the fifth star! The poet, linguist, and typographer Robert Bringhurst worked from transcriptions of Haida myths recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century, and allows those of us who don't speak Haida a chance to sit and listen to some of that nation's great mythtellers. We can never recover what it was like for their compatriots to hear these poems, but the rawness and directness of Bringhurst's translations brings us remarkably close, certainly closer than we get in the usual ironed-flat renditions. In this first of three volumes he intersperses his translations with a discussion of their cultural and intellectual context. (Some texts appear in the other volumes in revised form.) An ideal introduction, and few will be able to resist going on to the others

This is one of my favorite trance-inducing books of all time, in the top five. (I have read thousands). By trance-inducing I don't mean boring; I mean it sends you into the Otherworld right away and you might find it hard to return.
Disclaimer: No connection to the author besides a shared love of ancient poetry-myth, the Pacific Northwest and its cultures and the shamanic realm.

~ Lesley Thomas, author of arctic shaman novel Flight of the Goose

What I really love about this book is that the author brings history, sociology, linguistics, and literary analysis to bear on the Haida mythic literature so that there is enough context for us to understand it. In doing so, the author also shows us how we should think about myths, literature, and different cultures more generally.

The stories Robert Bringhurst covers were originally collected in their original language and translated by John Swanton a hundred years ago. Swanton's technique was rather unique at the time, because most of Swanton's contemporaries collected Native American stories only in English and tried to extrapolate a generalized story from the culture rather than preserve the individuality of each contributor's work.

Bringhurst describes the process by which Swanton did this, describes the mythtellers Swanton talked to, and analyzes the mythtellers works, pointing out aspects of the stories that are unique to their speakers and general to the culture. Bringhurst spends some time describing the Haida culture generally, its relationship to other nations along the West Coast, and how they were affected by Western culture, religion, and (tragically) diseases.