The Haida world is a misty archipelago a hundred stormy miles off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. For more than a thousand years before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished on these islands. In 1900 and 1901 the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last traditional Haida-speaking storytellers, poets, and historians. Robert Bringhurst worked for many years with these manuscripts, and here he brings them to life in the English language. A Story as Sharp as a Knife brings a lifetime of passion and a broad array of skills—humanistic, scientific, and poetic—to focus on a rich and powerful tradition that the world has long ignored.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
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"A beautiful weave of poetry anthology, poetics and anthropological adventure.”—Hans Werner, Toronto Star
(Hans Werner Toronto Star )
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Listening to the music of thought,
By "jmdeprada" (Hospitalet, Barcelona Spain) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Hardcover)
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.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The first volume in an essential series,
By
This review is from: A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers) (Paperback)
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
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astounding Journey,
By Lesley Thomas (the ether) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers) (Paperback)
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
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