SCHOOLS OF PRESENTATION
Of course, there is a big di erence between the literal translations produced for linguistic publications and the literary translations created for a wider audience. In the earliest days of text publishing in California, in volumes of the old University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology series, the format was an interlinear one, where the native-language text was accompanied by a running word-for-word gloss. The following example from the story “Grizzly Bear and Deer” in Sapir's Yana Texts (1910), taken down by phonetic dictation, serves to illustrate this format.[3]
| bamádu wáwi t‘;énna mik!ái∊i djútc! il∊aimádj | |
| Deer place | house. | Grizzly Bear | she was angry. | “Cut it o for me | |
― 26 ― | |
| aidju báci m$oC´yau dj$oC´tc! il∊ aitc'it∊ atdín∊t'i the your | flesh. | I shall eat it.” | Now she cut it right o, | |
| m$oC´citdi n∊t'ě∊a m$oC∊atdin+t' djíkithís 'itdjihám∊ | |
| now she roasted it, | now she ate it. | “It tastes good.” | “I looked for your lice.” | |
| auwítdín∊t' djína muitc! iláu∊atdi n t' barúll ópdji n∊t' | |
| Now she got hold of it | louse | Now she bit her | neck, | she killed her. | |
| dj$oC´t! alditdi n∊t' m$oC´ba n∊t' m$oC´ba n∊t'i dan∊máun | |
| Now she split her up, | she ate up all, | she ate up all | being much. | |
| ópdjiba n∊t' | |
| She killed all. | |
Because the glosses are not, strictly speaking, “readable” with any fluency or certitude (much less enjoyment), texts presented in this manner were generally also accompanied by a “free” translation, wherein considerable liberties might be taken to bring the story into conventional English storytelling prose. Here is Sapir's turn-of-the-century free translation of the preceding passage:
There was a house in which dwelt Deer. Grizzly Bear was angry. “Cut o some of your flesh for me,” (she said to Deer). “I am going to eat it.” Then (Deer) cut some of it right o and roasted it. (Grizzly Bear) ate it. “It tastes good,” (she said. Some time after this, she was lousing Deer, and scratched her. Deer protested; but Grizzly Bear said,) “I was lousing you.” Now she caught hold of a louse; now she bit (Deer's) neck and killed her. Then she cut up her belly and ate her up, ate up much. All (the Deer people) she killed.
Some of the liberties are obvious: the first sentence has been considerably contextualized, as has the clause dj$oC´t! alditdin ∊ t'‘now she split her up, it is said’; and near the end, the exact repetition of m$oC´ ban ∊ t' (i) ‘she ate her all up, it is said’ has been obscured, thanks to a misreading of prosodic junctures (the word dan ∊ má un goes with ó pdjiban∊ t', not with m$oC´ban ∊ t' i). The remote-past quotative element -n ∊ t' (i) ‘it is said’ has not been translated at all, either in the translation or in the gloss line. Still, these liberties, good or bad, are a orded precisely because the nativelanguage
Texts made and presented this way are often referred to as ethnolinguistic texts. Their practitioners, from Kroeber and his early Californianist colleagues all the way through to present-day scholars, all share the central Boasian belief in the primacy of the native-language text. Along with that insistence, however, often came a corresponding lack of interest in the translation of the text as an entity in itself—except insofar as it should reflect accurately the semantic and syntactic structures of the original. In short, the translation is just there as a “crib,” a convenient key to the native-language text. And because Boasian ethnolinguistics focused on the ethnographic and linguistic aspects of the texts collected, not so much on their aesthetic or poetic aspects, the aesthetic and poetic dimensions are only indirectly reflected in the translations of ethnolinguistic texts.[5]
Over the last couple of decades, there has been a change—some say a revolution, others merely an evolution—in the way scholars go about collecting, translating, and presenting Native American texts. Today, we refer to this new approach as ethnopoetics, in explicit contrast to the more classically oriented school of ethnolinguistics. Pioneered by Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnopoetics brings together the overlapping interests of linguistics, literary criticism, folklore, and anthropology. It makes the claim that a disciplined understanding of the aesthetic properties of an oral text, be it song or story or reminiscence, is essential to making a proper analysis—that there is an interplay between form and meaning that is ignored only at the risk of misinterpretation, misrepresentation, or both.[6] Such claims are taken for granted with written literary traditions. It should not be surprising to learn that these matters are just as relevant to oral literary traditions. Despite vast di erences, both modes, written and oral, fall within the broad domain of verbal art.[7]
The criticism raised against older ethnolinguistic treatments is that they tend to ignore poetics—those aspects of structure, style, and performance that make a text a work of verbal art. Ethnopoetic approaches seek to reverse this tendency. (Contemporary ethnolinguistic translators, of course, are much more conscious of the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of their texts.) To illustrate some of the characteristics of an
| 1 | There was a house at Deer's place. |
| Grizzly Bear, | |
| she was angry: | |
| “Cut me o a piece of your flesh— Grizzly said to Deer | |
| I'm going to eat it.” |
| 2 | Now right away she cut o a piece, they say. Deer did |
| Now she roasted it. Grizzly did | |
| Now she ate it. |
| 3 | “It tastes go-o-d!” |
| 4 | “I was just grooming you!” Grizzly protested, when Deer complained of roughness |
| 5 | Now she plucked up a louse. |
| Now she bit her through the neck— Deer's neck | |
| she killed her. |
| 6 | Now she carved her up. Grizzly did |
| She ate her all up, | |
| she ate her all up, they say. |
| 7 | There being so many, she killed them all. so many Deer people |
| 8 | She went o looking for them. for Deer's two children |
| She didn't see them. | |
| She came back. |
| 9 | She went down into the south. |
| She killed everything. | |
| She came back north. |
| 10 | O in the west she ate up all of the deer. |
| She came back east. |
| 11 | O to the north she ate up all the elk. |
| She ate them all up, | |
| she killed them all. |
| 12 | She headed back, they say, into the east. |
| She killed all of the deer. | |
| She stood still, they say. |
| 13 | She looked around. |
| “I have killed them all,” she said. | |
| “Now then!” she said. |
| 14 | Then she went back home, they say. |
The most obvious di erence, of course, is the typographical format: this translation is presented in broken lines—akin to poetry, not to prose. Furthermore, many of the lines are grouped into units that look like stanzas or verses, making the result superficially even more like poetry. I will have more to say about the nature of this resemblance later on; for now, I merely want to point out a few of the oral-literary features of the Yana story that are reflected in this excerpt.
In making the translation above, I used syntactic constituency as my main criterion for dividing the text into lines. Each line of translation, therefore, represents a clause or predication in the original Yana. When I then looked more closely at the sequence of lines, I noticed that some of them seemed to be more tightly linked together than others in terms of thematic unity. To reflect that observation, I used blank lines to represent the existence of these groups of lines (numbered in the left margin to facilitate discussion) on the page. Groups 5 and 8, for instance, form units on the basis of related action: in 5, it's the tight action-sequence of plucking, biting, and killing that defines these lines as a single rhetorical entity; in 8, it's the sequence of going, looking around, and returning that defines them as a unit.[8] In fact, all of the line-groups in this excerpt are defined by patterns of action or speech, as examination will reveal. What is interesting is how frequently these units seem to come in triplets. Eight of the fourteen line-groups in this passage contain three clauses each—a high enough proportion to speculate that this pattern represents some kind of rhetorical ideal, one that the narrator actually strove for in his oral composition of the work. (Indeed, a preliminary
Furthermore, the four “singlet” groups (3, 4, 7, 14) seem all to carry a special rhetorical force: by virtue of their brevity, their singularity, they tend to punctuate the rhythm and add dramatic highlight to the information they convey. In contrast, the lone “doublet” group (10) simply seems underdeveloped, in that it fails to realize the three-fold rhetorical pattern established in group 8, of going, doing something, and coming back. Groups 9 and 12 fulfill this template (though in 12, “standing still” takes the place of “coming back”), while group 11 appears to be an incomplete variant of the basic design, perhaps deliberate, perhaps not.
Sometimes this latent trinary patterning even plays out at higher levels than the line-group, as in this passage translated from the middle of the story:
| 1 | “Where are they?” she said. Grizzly looking for deer' children |
| 2a | She asked a poker; |
| it didn't answer. |
| 2b | She asked a stone; |
| it didn't answer. |
| 2c | She asked the earth, |
| she asked the stick, | |
| she asked the fire. |
| 3a | She asked the coals: |
| 3b | “Yes, indeed,” they said. |
| “They have run south,” they said. |
| 3c | “Aha!” she said. |
| 4 | She bit the stone, angry. |
| She bit the stick. | |
| She bit the fire. |
| 5 | She went right out. |
Only two of the nine separate sets of line-groups in this passage (2c and 4) are actually triplets in their own right, but it is easy to see the way the overarching structure of the passage involves a three-fold organization
This type of organic literary patterning, which Hymes (1976) has termed measured verse, is obscured in the typical prose-format presentations of the ethnolinguistic school but is nicely revealed by the brokenline presentations of the ethnopoetic school. On the whole, ethnopoetic texts and translations are more amenable or accessible to stylistic analysis than the typical ethnolinguistic text—in part because considerable rhetorical analysis has gone into working up the text in the first place.
While some ethnopoetic presentations try to make explicit the underlying rhetorical and compositional patterns of the text, others try instead to capture various “live” aspects of the performance itself—such dynamic features of the living human voice as intonation, vocal quality (shouting, whispering, and the like), and pause-phrasing. Hymes is most often associated with the former, Tedlock with the latter. I often refer to these two di erent ethnopoetic styles, respectively, as the structural and prosodic approaches to the poetics of oral literature. Structural approaches focus on the rhetorical architecture of the narrative and are most common with texts taken down earlier in the century by the method of phonetic dictation, whereas prosodic approaches focus on the voice and necessarily require texts that have been tape-recorded or videotaped, because only taped performances can capture and hold the sound of the voice itself in delivery.[10]
As it happened, the first scholar to try for a synthesis of these two methods, William Bright, was himself a Californianist, working with Karuk myths. Today most ethnopoetic practitioners who have the luxury of working with tape-recorded texts aim for some combination of the two approaches. The following translation, the middle section (Bright calls them “acts”) of a three-part myth, illustrates an integrated approach. The original was told in Karuk by Julia Starritt and translated by Bright. The story is a widespread myth, well-known in California and elsewhere in North America, called “Coyote Steals Fire.” In this presentation, Bright uses a number of typographical conventions to represent aspects of his ethnopoetic analysis (1979:94–95). Capitals, for instance, represent “extra-loud
| SO THEN THAT'S HOW THEY WENT UPRIVER. | |
| And Coyote arrived upriver. | |
| And he saw it was empty. | |
| And in the mountains he saw there were fires, | |
| there were forest fires, | |
| up in the mountain country. | |
| And he went in a house. | |
| And he saw only children were there. | |
| And he said: | |
| “Where have they gone? | |
| “Where have the men gone?” | |
| And the children said: | |
| “They're hunting in the mountains.” | |
| And he said: | |
| “I'm lying down right here, | |
| I'm tired.” | |
| And he said to the children: | |
| “I'll paint your faces! | |
| “Let me paint your faces. | |
| “You'll look pretty that way.” | |
| And the children said: | |
| “Maybe he's Coyote.” | |
| They were saying that to each other. | |
| And they said to him, | |
| to Coyote: | |
| “Maybe you're Coyote,” | |
| And he said: “No. | |
| “I don't even know | |
| where that Coyote is. | |
| “I don't hear, | |
| I don't know, | |
― 33 ― | |
| the place where he is.” | |
| And he said: | |
| “Let me paint your faces!” | |
| And when he painted all the children's faces, | |
| then he said: | |
| “SEE, I'VE SET WATER DOWN RIGHT HERE, | |
| SO YOU CAN LOOK INTO IT. | |
| “Your faces will look pretty! | |
| “BUT I'M LYING DOWN RIGHT HERE, | |
| I'M TIRED.” | |
| In fact, he had stuck fir bark into his toes. | |
| And then he stuck his foot in the fire. | |
| And then finally it caught fire well, | |
| it became a coal, | |
| it turned into a coal. | |
| And then he jumped up again. | |
| And he jumped out of the house. | |
| And he ran back downriver. | |
| And when he got tired, | |
| then he gave the fire to the next person. | |
| And he too started running. | |
| And in the mountain country, | |
| where there had been fires, | |
| then they all were extinguished. | |
| And then people said, | |
| “Why, they've taken it back from us, | |
| our fire!” | |
In an ethnopoetic presentation, the typographical layout of the text on the page (line breaks, indentations, font e ects, and the like) is used to convey linguistic information (intonation boundaries, syntactic structure, pauses, voice quality, and so on)—information that is primarily of interest to the specialist. At the same time, though, it o ers the nonspecialist a visually intuitive way into the flow and structure of the text as a verbal performance. Notice how the broken-line format of Bright's presentation works to slow the eye as it follows down the page and helps to re-create the pace or rhythm of the original. The vocal cues signaled by italics and caps add texture to the result.
The notion that oral storytelling is delivered in lines—which in turn
The misunderstanding comes about because, when these lines are delineated typographically by line breaks and further grouped into “stanzas” by means of blank lines or indentation, the resulting text looks like modern written poetry. Looking at a story presented in this fashion, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that Native American myths and stories are not prose but poetry. But in fact they are neither. Prose is a written category, as is our default conception of poetry. Whatever poetry (or prose, for that matter) might mean in the context of oral storytelling, it is simply not the same as what it means in the context of Western written literary tradition. All this is not to say that Native American storytelling is not poetic—it most certainly is, often densely and intricately so. But I particularly wish to avert the conclusion, implied by the broken-line formats of most ethnopoetic presentations, that it is poetry in the sense that literate Europeans and their cultural descendants typically understand that term. The purpose of presenting texts and translations in brokenline format is to highlight the poetic and rhetorical structures organic to the original language and performance patterns of the text—not to suggest potentially misleading cultural parallels between oral and Western written traditions.
And yet, over the years there has been considerable, sometimes even acrimonious, disagreement over these ideas, and ethnopoetics remains somewhat controversial even to this day.[13] Both paradigms continue to stimulate useful contributions to the discipline. For that reason, in addition
Both modes of translation are in active use today. Readers interested in comparing these two approaches will find that the di erence between the two camps has nothing to do with their literary quality. All the translations in this volume are literary translations, after all—carefully crafted with the intent of re-creating as far as possible in English the style and artistry of the original songs and stories.