Translation Studies

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Orality, literacy and the translator: A case study in

Haida translation

Jasmine Spencer

To cite this article: Jasmine Spencer (2018): Orality, literacy and the translator: A case study in
Haida translation, Translation Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2017.1417156

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TRANSLATION STUDIES, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2017.1417156

Orality, literacy and the translator: A case study in Haida

translation
Jasmine Spencer*
Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article integrates Venuti’s approach to the status of the Ethnopoetics; Indigenous
translator with Derrida’s (post-)structural histology of the letter to literatures; intersemiotics;
address the paradox inherent in the mythic (re)production of orality and literacy;
translation theory; animal
Indigenous oral texts and the risk of cultural appropriation. The
studies
case study is of contentious translations of Haida narratives from
the orators Ghandl and Skaay, both from Haida Gwaii, an
archipelago off the Canadian north-west coast, south of Alaska.
These narratives were recorded, translated and published at the
start of the last century and retranslated in 1995 and in 2000–01.
The article examines the conditions under which retranslation can
serve “narrative revitalization”: the rebirth of meaning through
intersemiotic communities of interest. Texts (re)produce readers,
and their languages reproduce speakers. The conclusion is that
the translator’s position on orality determines the conditions
under which their work has been embraced or excoriated,
suggesting that only dual-language text(ure)s permit adequate
“contact” with the stories.

Overview
Structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1971, 203) writes, in one of his later books, “La pensée
mythique est par essence transformatrice.” I take this punning paradox on the essence of
change itself – that which is transformative – to be playing off the title of his earlier book
La Pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss [1966] 1971), which is, in turn, a play on “wild pansies”
(European Graduate School 2012). “And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts”, says Ophelia
(Shakespeare 2005): untamed human thought. This naked form of thought is the organic
matter at stake in the translation of Indigenous texts – at least for some translators. For
Robert Bringhurst, whose translations of Haida oral narratives into written English
texts (Ghandl 2000; Skaay 2001, 2007)1 have been much contested (see e.g. Bradley
2004, 2007), the generative vitality of “myth” persists across languages. Working in
Lévi-Strauss’s mythic-structural tradition, but from the perspective of oral poetics,
Bringhurst (2011, 420) writes that “[l]anguage as written by writers and spoken by
mythtellers isn’t just talk; it’s a kind of intangible sculpture: something shaped and left
in place … for others to make sense of as they will”, adding that it is thus a “kind of

CONTACT Jasmine Spencer [email protected]

*Research conducted at the University of British Columbia.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. SPENCER

sculpture not seen in the mind’s eye so much as touched, caressed, and traced in the
fragrant dark”. His evocation of haptic contact with lively language expresses the desire
of many translators and readers to explore the hermeneutical materiality of “traditional”
Indigenous texts in a sensuous mode beyond sight – to touch the “logos-zōon”, as Jacques
Derrida (1981, 128) describes it, in his post-structural mode – to feel a full and vibrant
connection to mythic truths that are simultaneously transcendent and immanent in
relation to the languages within which they are expressed. These languages are thus sim-
ultaneously essential to the matrix of the source text and to the source text as the seeds for
the target texts that issue from them, yet belong to new linguistic matrices that differ in
every way. For “naked” man, then, to touch that transformative mythic essence is, in
Lévi-Strauss’s and Derrida’s terms, a punning paradox. Pansy pensées, the essence that
is also the womb of essence, and the idea of the wild feel of feeling itself are not easy
thoughts to think with. Yet together these concepts also clearly suggest that the phenom-
enon of transformation contains the “matrix” of its own becoming. Progeny is enfolded
into progenitor, a form of containment that, by its nature, essentializes non-essence.
Naked humanity can be a transformer, but can it be a translator? Or does meaning wait
in the darkness beyond words, as Bringhurst would have it? Is that darkness to be found
out beyond, or is it instead waiting inside the matrices of narrative? In playing with the
transformations of and in mythic thought, Lévi-Strauss might well be describing a
species of translation as much as the larger phenomenon of mythic transformation – a her-
meneutical, closed and virtuous circle of translation that has both great disadvantages and
some advantages. It is a form of thinking that is non-Indigenous and that can be quite
invasive, turning insides into outsides and fossilizing the flesh of stories. Yet it can also
be endlessly regenerative, permitting the recognition that matrix and seed reconstitute
one another; in other words, this viewpoint permits the derivation of new texts from
old by combining old and new texts to make newer ones, and doing so again, and
again. This is the act of retranslation, the phenomenon I theorize by analysing the relation-
ships that Bringhurst’s Haida translations embody and express in relation to the Haida
translations of another figure, John Enrico (1995). Both are retranslations based on oral
narratives collected in John Swanton’s (1905) Haida Texts and Myths, Skidegate Dialect.
Haida, at times classified as part of the Na-Dené language family and at times as a
language isolate, is spoken in Haida Gwaii, which is the unceded territory of the Haida
Nation; in southern Alaska; and in urban centres where those who speak Haida may
live, such as Seattle. The links between language and place are an important part of
Haida sovereignty, and the archipelago of Haida Gwaii, with its weather, mountains,
forests, beaches and ocean, is beautiful as well as potentially challenging to get to. A com-
parable beauty and potential inaccessibility can be found in some of the approaches to the
Haida texts I look at here, due to the aesthetic and ethical challenges of transcription,
translation and access.
In this article, I situate Bringhurst’s and Enrico’s methods for translating Indigenous
literatures in Canada in relation to the theory of orality and literacy. I do so in order to
examine the larger question of the social contexts of the translators as contested per-
sonas with contested responsibilities to the communities addressed by and in their
work. In particular, I identify their methods as examples of “ethnopoetics” (the trans-
formation of oral narratives into writing using verse form, rather than prose, with the
aim of highlighting grammatical and structural meanings) in order to demonstrate the
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 3

problems and potentials of inferring from the narratives themselves larger contextual
cues for interpretation.
Something I do not do here is quote from the stories that Bringhurst and Enrico trans-
late. This is not because the stories are not the best part: they are! Nor do I resist quoting
from them to enact a discourse of presence and absence: they are available to be read if one
has enough money and time. And that is a problem: these stories have contested values
because Haida protocol and Euro-American copyright are in conflict. Their cultural
value has been monetized into a colonial currency rather than according to Haida proto-
cols, and this is one of the issues I examine. I would like to share quotations from these
stories, and I know many readers would like this, too; and this is very much the point.
Many translators of Indigenous narratives, as well as the orators whose narratives they
translate, have contributed in some sense to the Indigenous-English-language literary
corpus in Canada by operating in multiple languages, multiple media, multiple cultural
contexts and multiple epistemological modes. Their contributions are invaluable and rep-
resent decades of serious dedication, and each person is uniquely motivated by aesthetic
and political concerns. Sometimes these concerns conflict, and in order to understand
the positions which lead to conflict we need context. I take as my starting point the
accepted truth that the context of the oratory event is important to the interpretation of
narratives performed during that event (Herman 2009, 17). To theorize something
about contexts for oral stories that are put into print, I combine translation theorist Lawr-
ence Venuti’s hermeneutical approach to interpreting texts with deconstructionist Derri-
da’s post-Lévi-Straussian approach to interpreting texts. In my analysis of Bringhurst’s
and Enrico’s retranslations as “translation events”, I suggest that forms of transmission
are distinct yet also inseparable from their production and reception given the juxtaposi-
tion of oral, traditional and printed, translated contexts for the stories. Such “events” are
thus self-contained, as per Venuti, yet also inextricably imbricated in a large intercultural
context by virtue of their making. I argue that, regardless of the cost, all translations of
narratives from Indigenous languages to English or other dominant-culture languages
should include the narratives in the source as well as target languages for two reasons:
(1) the source languages are useful for Indigenous language revitalization projects, the
maintenance and teaching of Indigenous languages; and (2) dual-language texts also
make more fully accessible the possibility of what I term “narrative revitalization”, the
potential in traditional narratives for cultural renewal, sometimes through the immensely
valuable practice of retranslation. The effect of the latter point of my two-part argument is
exactly what Enrico and Bringhurst undertake – but not the former point, or not entirely.

Narrative revitalization
While both Enrico and Bringhurst engage with the stories meaningfully, I think of narra-
tive revitalization primarily as a phenomenon which may accompany language revitaliza-
tion. While I also wish to use the term “narrative revitalization” to describe the power of
traditional stories to teach cultural truths in any language, a power on which Bringhurst’s
translations rely, the term is meant to affirm the practical and conceptual power of the
stories in the languages in which they are told. Stories are more interesting to learn
from than simple grammatical lessons (although these, too, are important): this is their
practical potential for revitalization. But it has been my experience that the stories as
4 J. SPENCER

they are told in their Indigenous languages are also conceptually powerful: their narrative
structure, through the study of their linguistic content, requires a perpetual return to the
question of meaning at all levels – discourse features, lexicon, syntax, morphology, pho-
nology and interpretive response. Bringhurst’s translations offer narrative and cultural
information, while Enrico’s offer syntactic, morphological and lexical information. Both
kinds of translation together, through the phenomenon of retranslation, have the potential
to permit narrative revitalization. In these ways, texts may (re)produce readers, and their
languages may reproduce speakers. Here, I focus on the translation event as a level of
reproduction.

Orality and translation

The Haida narratives that Enrico and Bringhurst retranslated are oral stories that were
transcribed, translated and published in print form by Swanton at the turn of the last
century for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. Swanton
worked with several Haida orators, and some context for the transcription event is impor-
tant to engaging with subsequent translation events. Swanton’s epistemological assump-
tions predate ethnopoetics but are receptive to living language in ways that I describe
further below. The original frontispiece to the 1905 publication situates Swanton’s author-
ial status as standing in relation to texts that were “Recorded by John R. Swanton” (1).
There were multiple people involved in the oration-transcription interface itself;
Swanton writes that the “story teller first repeats a short section of his story which my
interpreter then dictates to me very slowly and I take down” (Swanton, quoted in Bring-
hurst 2011, 173). The stories were transcribed by Swanton using a phonetic notation
system (Enrico 1995, 3) and were translated in part while he was in Haida Gwaii by
Haida speakers, among them Henry Moody (from Skidegate), Mary Ridley and Henry
Edenshaw (both from Masset) (ibid., 2). The value of Swanton’s phonetic (rather than
phonemic) transcription system for revealing unique variations in performative enunci-
ation or dialect is perhaps somewhat offset by his under-representation of vowels,
glottal stops, glottalized resonants, syllable-final h and tone (3).
But the living power of the stories was not lost on Swanton; he writes, in an unpublished
memoir (Swanton 1944, 26–27), that while in Haida Gwaii he would hike where there was
once an “old story town”, and that “my mind was full of the stories, so that I almost
expected to see a killer whale come to shore and dissolve itself into a manlike supernatural
being”. Swanton’s experiences in Haida Gwaii concerned both death and life, then – the
“old story town” may have been abandoned due to smallpox but persisted in living
memory. He was a devout Swedenborgian (see Swanton 1928, 1948). For him, the her-
metic precept “as above, so below” may have cohered with his impression that the
ocean below might shape his experiences above, on land: that stories, like killer whales
– orcas – could literally cross world boundaries. Swanton (1948) opens his book Supersti-
tion – But Whose? by stating that he is surprised that, until his retirement and subsequent
investigation of “parapsychology”, the study of “vocal or script communications [of ‘spir-
itualism’] in full light with practical elimination of fraud had escaped [him] entirely
although [he] might have expected something of the kind from [his] own experience”
(6). It seems possible that Swanton was open to, perhaps had experienced, in his
opinion, manifestations of the inner in the outer. And while his world view inevitably
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 5

inflects transcription and translation events, the Haida stories may have changed him, too:
certainly he felt that he was affected by the ocean, forest and sky of Haida Gwaii. He writes
in his memoir (Swanton 1928, 26) that “just back from the high tide line mark there begins
a jungle of bushes and behind it a dank and lofty forest and underneath the latter a mat-
tress often of fallen monarchs of the forest”, and that “one may sometimes climb many feet
off the ground in trying to cross such an obstruction”. Swanton also writes that “when I
was not working with the informants, I used to climb a high rock not far from the house”
and watch “showers with intervals of sunshine between” and “[f]locks of sea fowl float
about or take off in long lines, flap, flap, flpa [sic; corrected in the typescript], along the
surface of the water” (27), concluding that Haida Gwaii “was to me a weird and beautiful
country and remains so in recollection” (27). While one must at least note the possibility of
a Romantic Swanton, Guujaaw similarly emphasizes the power of direct experience of
Haida Gwaii when he writes that “Haida culture is not simply song and dance, graven
images, stories, language, or even blood”, but also “waking up on Haida Gwaii anticipating
the season when the herring spawns”, and the “feeling you get when you bring a feed of
cockles to the old people”, when you are “fixing up fish for the smokehouse”, or when you
are “walking on barnacles or moss” (vii). Swanton’s transcription of the stories thus has
many layers, but his recording and publication of them were limited by time and
funding (Bringhurst 2011, 179). For this reason, among others, Bringhurst has done exten-
sive archival research on Swanton’s records; two of the most notable orators, for Bring-
hurst, were Ghandl and Skaay. In written form, Ghandl’s and Skaay’s oral narratives
have been taken up by the academic community.
Orality and literacy are, at times, construed to be opposing modes, often due to colonial
attitudes. Such attitudes are described by Bruno Latour (1993, 103), following Jack Goody,
as the precept of the “Great Divide” held to exist between pre-modern and modern
peoples, articulated by Latour as the Euro-American assumption that pre-modern epis-
temologies, including those expressed in oral or non-alphabetical media, “never dis-
tinguish between signs and things”. This assumption severs aesthetics from ethics,
permitting the simultaneous implementation and enforcement of genocidal policies
upon bodies marked as “Indigenous” with multicultural policies funding research con-
cerning physical “things” belonging to Indigenous peoples – things that embody
corpora of textual “signs”. Even when colonial or neocolonial agendas are rejected,
media technologies (analogue and digital recordings) within which Indigenous textual
signs operate are often assumed to embody the primary lenses through which to interpret
semiological content, which, for the purpose of this article, includes “textualized orature”;
that is, oral narratives transcribed into print (Gingell 2004, 286). Those who ascribe to the
Great Divide as a divide between orality and literacy as artistic and social practices define
textualized orature as both traditionally and individually formulated, theorize it as stages
in progressive cultural development towards print, and prophesy these stages as cyclical,
generating contradictory understandings of the production, transmission and reception of
textualized orature (see e.g. Lord 1991, 2000; Ong 1992; McLuhan 2003).
However, both oral and written modes have been demonstrated to be mutually
exploited means for the transmission of art and knowledge: orality and literacy are
often practised in technological, conceptual and modal combinations (Coleman 1997,
161), signifying differently in different cultural contexts, but seldom in isolation. In the
case of Indigenous narratives in Indigenous languages, this dual modality has often
6 J. SPENCER

supplemented community-based curation of narratives concerning origins, genealogies,

geographies, histories, humour and survival methods in, for example, fighting colonial
theft of land as well as colonial legal epistemologies in court cases concerning land
claims that require oral-historical testimony. At the same time, orality as such continues
to be a vital and independent medium requiring sensitivity to context, tradition and inno-
vation, performativity and apprenticeship according to protocols specific to the commu-
nities and traditions of the orators. However, an important question remains: what guides
the process from textualization to translation when translators are divided from the per-
formative context of the narratives by generations?
Many translators, including Bringhurst, emerge from training in the theory and prac-
tice of interpreting classical Near-Eastern, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian texts that are
often theorized to have their origins in oral traditions now irretrievable except through
exegetical inference. The communities within which such ancient texts circulated are
long gone – unlike Indigenous communities in North America. Yet the problem of
interpretation based solely on textual (i.e. printed) analysis has continued to absorb scho-
lars of Indigenous literatures. This problem, and the problem of how ekphrastically to rep-
resent the sound, the sight, the timing, the movement and the feeling of orature in the
medium of print, led to the development of ethnopoetics, where performance is rep-
resented through typographic and verse forms. Ethnopoetics revisits “oral narratives
taken down via dictation in the earlier decades of the twentieth century from American
Indian people and printed in prose paragraphs” that reflect the limits of earlier
methods of textualization (Moore 2009, 295). Ethnopoetics can also reflect the limitations
of contemporaneous academic values. Lauri Honko (2000, 11–12) suggests that, histori-
cally, oral-literary scholarship underwent a “text is king” stage that gave way to a “per-
formance is king” stage in the 1970s – one of the underlying causes in the development
of ethnopoetics that emphasizes a theory of “composition-in-performance” over memor-
ization and a theory of an “extended text” to help convey information beyond the words
themselves, including “paralinguistic expression such as gesture” and “collateral action
(dance, pantomime, ritual, song, orchestra)” (12). Honko calls for the next scholarly
stage of analysis of oral literatures to be one of “intersemiotic translation”, where
factors such as the “invisible presence of traditions not expressed verbally but influencing
the processing of meaning” (13) are included in the interpretations of texts.
Another way that this intersemiotic, doubly comparative method of interpretation
might be applied is through analysis of multiple translations of the same narratives,
which I do below with the two examples of Enrico and Bringhurst, towards an intersemio-
tic translation extended from orator to transcriptor and then to the translator, “relativiz-
ing” the process of transmission through intertextual comparative analysis. Honko’s
intersemiotic approach is ordered around three synchronic sites of the “reception” of
orature that cumulatively form a diachronic comparative assessment of composition or
entextualization: the “pool of tradition”, the “internalizing of a particular epic” and the
“intertextual interpretation by the audience” (17). This juxtaposition of the synchronic
with the diachronic offers a helpful cue to approaching multiple translations using a con-
textual rather than strictly generic approach. The work of the translator might be synchro-
nically identified in the source document, the target document and archival traces that
reveal the translator’s theory and method. The diachronic must come into effect in
more intersemiotic or inferential ways by considering the initial oratorical context –
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 7

including the dynamic between orator and transcriber – and the conditions for the sub-
sequent encounters of multiple translators with the same narratives (i.e. access to publi-
cations, training, social and disciplinary contexts), especially when the textual traces do
not retain direct statements of theoretical and methodological intent from the orators
themselves. This is the question of world view – a sometimes implicit formulation of
belief and supporting epistemological processes that are expressed in the translator’s
total oeuvre and sometimes explicit formulation of belief expressed when the translator
publishes statements about translation.
All of these explicit and implicit issues of desire must be contextualized by discussions
that are really about much more than the words themselves. Like discussion around
language revitalization itself (Hill 2002, 119), the production and reception of textualized
orature must be situated not only within the oratorical context but also the translated
context, including questions of linguistic performativity and generic colonization. I
believe that links between language revitalization and what I am calling “narrative revita-
lization” often begin with interpretations of narratives in the target language and work
back towards the qualities of the source language. This doubled set of phenomena is con-
gruent with the nature of referentiality and indexicality, lexicon and semantics, syntax and
structure; the question is how to select the most relevant correlates between theory and
practice in order to establish an effectively multimodal yet cumulatively hermeneutical
gestalt from which to infer the violence and beauty of each narrative in translation
within the context of the lives of the orator, transcriptor, translator and resulting texts.
This is where translation theory becomes important to interpreting the interpreters.
When translation theory moves from the inferential to the metaphorical or even alle-
gorical, questions of aesthetics and ethics have the potential to become expressions of very
large issues, much as language revitalization projects enact larger issues than vocabulary,
permitting articulations of a community’s desires. In the context of translation, such
articulations are not solely the desires of the Indigenous community to which the
orator belongs, but also the translator’s, however invisibly those desires circulate in the
text. The question of visibility is where my analysis of Bringhurst’s work began, and it
is a question one must ask in relation to his work because his translations are so very meta-
phorical – Haida supernatural beings he glosses as “gods” and Haida orature he glosses as
“classical”. Does this make Bringhurst a more visible or a less visible figure in relation to
his translations? In other words, does his style overshadow the source narratives or does it
make his source narratives so accessible to Euro-American readers that he is obscured by
the seeming-visibility of the texts?

Translation and revitalization

Lawrence Venuti has developed a theory of translation that tracks the idea of the “invis-
ible” translator in the history of translation. Venuti (1995, 14–15) writes that “[t]he more
fluent the translation, the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible
the writer or meaning of the foreign text”, and then proceeds to interrogate this formula by
demonstrating that “fluency” in translation is a value framed by “commodity production
and exchange” where “these developments have affected every medium, both print and
electronic, by valorising a purely instrumental use of language and other means of
representation and thus emphasising immediate intelligibility and the appearance of
8 J. SPENCER

factuality” (18). This grim view of mediation as essentially an overwhelmingly fascistic

force that renders unintelligible linguistic heterogeneity intelligibly homogeneous must
be taken seriously without embracing it as inevitable.
Resisting this inevitability, Douglas Robinson (1998) critiques Venuti’s argument for a
translatorial method that is highly visible, suggesting that Venuti’s insistence on a Benja-
minian, radical “foreignism” is elitist since the radical requires the mystical and the mys-
tical requires arbitration if it is to be articulated. This is, I think, valid; but I would add that
the difference between the instrumentalism of fluent translation and the mysticism of for-
eignism is after all, by definition, irresistible and also irreconcilable: the first translation
method requires the logic of negation and the second the negation of logic. The tension
between inherent but always denied fascist approaches, and immanent but always deferred
messianic approaches to perpetuating intersemiotic meaning cannot and should not be
ignored. However, it is also important to remember that some Haida thinkers might
suggest a relational approach to communication far beyond that of the book as a kind
of ontological commodity. For example, Guujaaw, a Haida leader, opens Enrico’s collec-
tion with a statement titled “This Box of Treasures”, writing that “if all that there was to be
known was available in books, we would have little need for each other” (Guujaaw 1995,
vii). He goes on: “Look past the written word and you will find yourself in the world of a
people whose fate is intimately tied to the ocean people, the sky people, and the forest
people” (vii). This statement models a form of communication intelligible only through
a direct experience of relational thinking – relation not through negation nor through a
refusal of negation, but through respect, reciprocity and a sensitivity to the personhood
of all entities who speak from humanity and from well beyond the human.2
The question of “intelligibility” is particularly crucial in the translation, publication and
criticism of Indigenous oral literatures in Canada due to the country’s relatively small
population, such that market demands that are shaped by concerns about both the cost
of printing dual-language editions and the readability of translated texts. On the one
hand, intelligibility might be assumed to be greater if both source and target languages
are available in the body of the book. But on the other hand, Venuti (1995, 18) suggests
that, in a sleight-of-hand manoeuvre, oftentimes “the translator works to make his or
her work ‘invisible’ ” to force the illusion of a textual “transparency that simultaneously
masks its status as an illusion” so that the “translated text seems ‘natural,’ i.e., not trans-
lated”, with little or no need to retain the source language. This “natural” and “transpar-
ent” text is geared to the dominant linguistic-cultural framework; in Canada and the
United States, this is English, with all the indices of privilege accompanying assumptions
about publications in English, including accessibility for the sake of consumerism as much
as for illumination. The unintelligible is deemed deficient, unfinished and/or unworthy of
consumption. It is bitter like the ocean, untouchable like the sky and inert as a reserve of
trees. Through the separation of nature and culture, with those who embrace nature
pushed apart from culture, mediation is collapsed into facility. The translator must be
caught between these forces.
Venuti’s work offers a potential solution as well as critique. The Scandals of Translation:
Towards an Ethics of Difference (Venuti 1998) concerns a synthetic translation theory
addressing indigeneity as such. In it, Venuti writes: “Translating is uniquely effective in
exacerbating the tensions of colonial discourse” due to the “move between colonial and
indigenous languages” that “can refigure the cultural and political hierarchies between
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 9

them, upsetting the identity-forming process, the mimicry of hegemonic values on which
colonization relies” (171). In this, Venuti hints that the engendering of culture always
involves a certain amount of transformation as it passes through new media in either
direction.3 Conflict is not, in other words, always a bad thing. In a more recent work,
Venuti (2013, 11) notes that while the translation is an “inscription [that] begins with
the very choice of a text for translation … and continues in the development of discursive
strategies to translate it, always a choice of certain receiving discourses over others”, there
is also inherent in the act of translation a utopian impulse, which, however, may become
misdirected – or not. In ideal form, this utopian impulse is dialogical in its synthesis of the
visible with the invisible.
At best. Yet Venuti (2013, 16) also suggests that a translation can “communicate to its
readers an understanding of the source text that is available to readers who are natives of
the source culture or at least proficient in its language and conversant with its forms and
practices” in a way that “will always be partial, both incomplete and inevitably slanted
towards the receiving situation” – a “second-order” form of communication “built upon
but signifying beyond a lexicographical equivalence, encompassing but exceeding what
Walter Benjamin called the ‘message,’ ‘information’ or ‘content’ ”. I think that this parti-
ality and the reaching beyond always commensurate with it can occur in a way that sig-
nifies a utopian form of hope, a vision of interpretation requiring “leaps of faith”, as
Benjamin puts it, who writes, of translation, that it is a form of exceeding that “proceeds
from the original” in the sense that it is derivative “[n]ot indeed so much from its [the orig-
inal’s] life as from its ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’ ” (Benjamin 153).4 Crucially, Benjamin calls for
“leaps” in the plural – a process of production by way of a plurality of beliefs that I propose
to describe and interpret as a kind of radical agnosticism. I would add, to Venuti’s scepti-
cism and Benjamin’s optimism, James Clifford’s (1988, 341–342) question as a corrective
to his own concerns about allegorical affinities or universals at discursive removes: “is any
part of a tradition ‘lost’ if it can be remembered, even generations later, caught up in a
present dynamism and made to symbolize a possible future?” And Venuti does construe
Clifford’s “dynamism” by way of Benjamin’s “afterlife” to be a kind of Venutian “commu-
nity of interest” that is constructed in the act of translation, even if source values, cultures
and languages are at risk of being made invisible in exchange for making invisible the
translator.
Venuti (2013, 20) argues that a “community of interest” may “arise spontaneously
when the translation is published” or be formed when the translation is “housed in an
institution where the translation is made to perform different functions, academic or reli-
gious, cultural or political, commercial or municipal”, although these communities will
always be heterogeneous in “language, identity, or social position” in a “linguistic ‘zone
of contact’” (see also Pratt 1991). New possibilities for interpretation emerge as a
result: Venuti suggests that when the source text of a translation is referred back to
enough by its readers, it “becomes the site of interpretive communities that may
support or challenge current canons and interpretations, prevailing standards and ideol-
ogies”, and when “source texts have achieved mass circulation, a translation becomes the
site of unexpected groupings, fostering communities of readers who would otherwise be
separated by cultural differences and social divisions and yet are now joined by a
common fascination” (ibid., 20). Further, Venuti argues, “[i]f the domestic inscription
[of the translation] includes part of the social or historical context in which the source
10 J. SPENCER

text first emerged”, then it is possible that “translation can also create a community that
includes source intelligibilities and interests, an understanding in common with another
culture, another tradition” (20–21). This point gestures to the possibility of a subtler
form of intersemiotic, intercontextual critique of translations.
I believe that, in suggesting that some, but not all, experiences of translated texts might
be held “in common with another culture”, Venuti is referencing the theory of “retransla-
tion”, which postulates that translations of a text subsequent to the first translation to cir-
culate broadly tend to be “less domesticating” (Paloposki and Koskinen 2004, 27), and
thus often “mark a return to the source-text” (Yves Gambier, quoted in ibid., 28). This
seems to me to be an atemporally oriented social-historical interpretation of Benjamin’s
(1997, 154) reverence for translation, which Benjamin founds on the conviction that trans-
lation “ultimately has as its purpose the expression of the most intimate relationships
among [all] languages”, although, at the same time he believes that “[t]ranslation
cannot possibly reveal or produce this hidden relationship”. In this shadowy light, the
translation of Indigenous oral literatures is a lengthy process indeed: retranslation back
towards an ever more complexly contextualized source text may well result in increasingly
subtle translations that could eventually require readers actually to be reading source-
language versions of Indigenous narratives. Limited time and resources make this ideal
an especially fraught one in non-colonial cultures such as Haida, Tlingit or northern
Dene/Athabaskan because the ideal of retranslation may also risk rendering the poetics
and hermeneutics of Indigenous sovereignties – representational control of Indigenous lit-
eratures for Indigenous communities – instrumental for the sake of Imperial – colonial,
linear, dispensational and anti-Indigenous – time.

Case study
Imperial time is the issue at stake in Enrico’s retranslations through re-elicitation in his
1995 Skidegate Haida Myths and Histories, insofar as his method of re-elicitation demon-
strates a systematic focus on the transfer of meaning in the Haida language over time to
the detriment of the readability of his text, although he does insist with linguistic integrity
upon that branch of translation theory that has been called “product-oriented (synchronic
and diachronic ‘text-focused’ comparisons by era, area, or language)” (Holmes [1972]
1988, 72–73). Enrico (1995, 10) writes that the “whole of the Skidegate collection was
re-elicited with gid7ahl qaa7angaa, Mrs Hazel Stevens, now aged 94 years, and laall
t’aarway, Mrs Kathleen Hans, aged 92” (original emphasis), and he states that since
“neither of these women was sent to residential school”, they “have as close to nineteenth
century knowledge of the language as one could find”. He also notes that Hazel Stevens has
direct experience with the storytellers who worked with Swanton, including Walter
McGregor, whose Haida name is Skaay, and that Kathleen Hans’s father is Henry
Young, who “was exposed to all the individuals listed above [storytellers who contributed
to Swanton’s publications] in his youth and was himself a noted storyteller”. Of his trans-
lation, Enrico states that “[w]hile these texts are of interest for their cultural content, they
are also of interest for the linguistic information they contain”, clarifying that “in fact they
were re-elicited, edited, and re-translated because of their linguistic, not their cultural
value” (10). Consequently, while his “translation aims to be as close to the Haida as poss-
ible” (although the two are arranged in facing-page dual-language form, rather than with
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 11

interlinear glossing), because the “use of pronouns and ellipses in Haida differs from that
in English (evidence of different strategies in the two languages for following the flow of
events)”, these “were not always preserved in translation”. Enrico also changes the order-
ing of a few segments of thought: “Presentation of material as an afterthought was not
always preserved when it would have been better to put it in the sentence instead.” So,
Enrico is quite explicit about how he changes or stays as true to the source texts as he
is able.
Yet I find it notable that, although he uses “we” to refer to his and his consultants’
shared dependence upon Swanton for certain unknown words and expressions, Enrico
(1995, 10) does not use any personal pronouns at all to explain the decisions made in
his translation of the narratives. Perhaps most interestingly of all, he makes two final
notes about invariants, words that are carried forward from the Haida language into
English without translation. First, he states (ibid., 11) that “[s]tory lexicon-words, often
names, used only in stories – is characteristic of Native American stories and is a
feature that is impossible to capture in translation”, and adds, in brackets, “(in fact in a
few cases no meaning is known and the Haida is simply repeated in the translation)”.
Enrico goes on to say: “Interpretive comments are kept as factual as possible – identifi-
cations of places, ethnographic facts, and so on. There is no place in this volume for
‘interpretations’ of the myths” (11). I find this statement significant because of its
double nature: it contradicts itself because it occurs in a context that emphasizes the
value of the source language for the source culture, yet in the very act of translation it dis-
misses “interpretation”, as if translation were a separate phenomenon. Enrico is focussed
upon what Venuti calls an “instrumental” approach to translation. Enrico is more than
willing to acknowledge that many lexical features of the narratives are untranslatable
even as he identifies the ways he has modified syntactical features – and then steps
back from embracing these practices as hermeneutical. It seems to me that he would
like to believe – and perhaps he would be correct in believing – that he refrains from
answering Honko’s interpretive call for “intersemiotic translation”, resisting the idea of
Venuti’s “translating-language inscription in the source text” while paradoxically adhering
to an inherently futural utopia that is source-culture-focussed by inherently historical
means.5
As I imply above, I believe that renewable contexts are crucial to linguistic revitalization
and that an analogous form of revitalization may be occurring at a narrative level in eth-
nopoetic translations – or, at least, has the potential to occur. This can be as terrifying, in
the old-fashioned sublime sense, as it can be potent. Indeed, my other example of the
figure of the translator, Bringhurst (2009, 166), writes in one of his poems, “Demons
and Men”, that “everybody’s culture, custom, manner – / her identity, his ethos – is a
minor, mortal, god”, while he states in an interview concerning his translations of
Haida orature that “[l]anguage is a price you have to pay in order to have literature.
But for the difficulties language causes literature, there is a partial cure. It’s called trans-
lation” (Bringhurst, quoted in Rigaud 2002, 22). Bringhurst’s contextual framework for
interpreting orature is thus a poetics of depersonalization – in metaphorical terms, of
penetrating and extracting from both the source text and himself that which is necessary
to breed a new god. Bringhurst has been excoriated by some members of the Haida Nation
for his work as translator, while other translators such as Ronald Scollon and Nora and
Richard Dauenhauer have been lauded, and yet other translators such as Swanton and
12 J. SPENCER

Enrico have gone relatively unnoticed. Why? Is there a correlation between the potential of
a translated text, as Venuti suggests, to be disseminated, and its discursive microstructure,
its historical texture, but also its “histological” tissue?
Bringhurst’s exopoetic approach bears striking similarities to Derrida’s (1981, 128) his-
tological formulation of mythology and “pharmakographic aggression”. Derrida (ibid., 65)
writes of intersemiotic literary systems that they are the “graphic relations between the
living and the dead”, drawing a connection between “the textual, the textile, and the histo-
logical”, such that, I believe, “within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the
histos and the question of the histos of the metaphor”, meaning is woven together by the
desires of orator and writer, reader and translator. The means of this histology, for
Derrida, originates in the Platonic mode of the play of language. The letter as supplement
must first penetrate the logos and then be excised so that “exteriority as a supplement, ines-
sential yet harmful to the essence, a surplus that ought never to have come to be added to the
untouched plenitude of the inside” is restored in a mythopoeic imperative to “reconstitute,
recite – and this is myth as such, the mythology for example of a logos recounting its own
origin” (128). This is the nature of pharmakographic aggression, and it is an extension of
Lévi-Strauss’s transformatrice. The matrix essentializes in order to exceed itself. Thus
Derrida is able to write that “[s]uch are the relations between the writing supplement
and the logos-zōon”; but he clarifies that “[i]n order to cure the latter of the pharmakon
and rid it of the parasite, it is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place” – reversing
prolapse, as it were – in order to “keep the outside out” (128).6 Likewise Bringhurst. He
acknowledges the divide between himself and his work, but a genocidal gap exacerbates
the immediacy, urgency and biopolitical implications of Indigenous literary and national
sovereignty in Canada such that his work must necessarily be rejected, at times.
Perhaps Bringhurst’s work has also been interpreted as out of fashion and out of favour
due to the way that orality versus literacy maps onto breath versus death, utterance versus
silence, significance versus symbol. So, the act of translation, which attempts to enter the
transformative matrix of the source language, when it is done with a view to “recite”, must
also always “distort” and thus be overwritten by the “community of interest” that forms
around it, lest a kind of conceptual splicing between essence and matrix develop,
making source and target imperceptible, which is unacceptable for those seeking an iden-
tity politics of divided ethics or aesthetics. Socially, this overwriting may occur with the
figure of the translator. Although Bringhurst (2011, 71) acknowledges that the aggressive
tradition of the translation and publication of missionary texts in Indigenous languages
has been perniciously detrimental to the health of Indigenous communities, languages
and cultures, he does not publicly, collectively consult the Haida Nation on protocols sur-
rounding Haida narratives. Bringhurst knows his position is fundamentally external to the
Haida Nation as a collective and does not try to obscure this fact, as Enrico seems to in his
claims to linguistic authority through re-elicitation. Bringhurst’s book of essays on Haida
oral literature, A Story as Sharp as a Knife, is now in its second edition (Bringhurst 2011),
and in that new edition he has added a “Political Afterword” (418–424), which echoes his
ambivalence about language as the “price you have to pay” for letters and the “partial cure”
for that price, which is translation. Yet I wonder. In his afterword (Bringhurst 2011, 420),
he writes that, while he taught himself to read and translate Haida, “I have never learned to
speak it nor become very adept at understanding it as a spoken tongue. Why? Because I
don’t much like to talk.” This is a defence that might not stand the test of time.
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 13

Bringhurst (2011, 256) writes that “[for the orator] Skaay, even elemental statements
about the nature of knowledge and being require sustaining narrative context”, an
observation that is meant to reference Skaay’s embodied style but is also suggestive
of Bringhurst’s conviction that he himself, as translator, should provide a narrative of
interpretive parataxis – a paradoxically “quintessential vehicle”. Bringhurst’s is a
vision, then, that exceeds re-vision: it is meant to evoke a form that will otherwise
and even so be lost. It is salvage translation, though of a beautiful kind, and it signifies
as such through its exopoetic techniques. Salvage in the sense that it does not enact the
possibility of a living retranslation of itself. But this does not mean it is not myth, myth
as Bringhurst intended. In James Boon’s (1982, 244) words, Lévi-Strauss was convinced
that “[m]yths signify signification”; might the reverse also be claimed, that significations
of signification are myth? This would be an inversion that reveals in Bringhurst’s exo-
poetic practice a hidden “texture”. In the contact of hand to sculpture, Bringhurst
coheres with, yet also countermands, Derrida’s “histology” of the text, where translation
is the membrane between writing and meaning. This triune organ of communication
(sound, touch, sight) is a text whose “law and its rules are not, however, harboured
in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that it can never be booked, in the
present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception” (Derrida 1981,
63). This is “perception” as instrumental inception. But “booking” perception is pre-
cisely Bringhurst’s desire; it is his desire to bring his sense of Haida narratives out of
the past, from breath and skin to print and typography. As a typographer, Bringhurst
(2011, 64) seeks to use textual type – fonts and other decorative features of the printed
page – to extend or “recite” the meaning of narrative content, and his theories of typo-
graphy as “alphaprosodic” extensions of poetic meaning in conjunction with his theories
concerning “semoprosodic” Haida tree carvings and button blankets resonate with nar-
ratives about animal skins and the books that embody them – a topoprosody, I suggest,
that dreams only of intercourse, never of inception (i.e. of epistemological dissemination
of textual meaning free of alphaprosodic notions of referentiality). Bringhurst’s trans-
lations, then, are instrumental but not referential, not in the sense that Enrico’s are.
Bringhurst’s are haptic objects with indexical functions, instead: they are meant to be
sculpture. Perdurable, not alive.
Yet they are alive as objects, however impersonal, just as Indigenous source texts speak
even when the language is unknown to the reader. Thus here I would like to suggest that
Derrida’s (1981, 63) intersemiotic reading of tissue, text and texture includes the sense that
text also always reads the reader, extending backwards in time in order to move forwards,
so that
dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web; a web that
envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefi-
nitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading.

In fact, there is
always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it
had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to
look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the “object,” without risking
– which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught – the
addition of some new thread. (ibid., 63)
14 J. SPENCER

Derrida concludes this point by stating that “[a]dding, here, is nothing other than giving to
read” – and, I would add, nothing other than giving to translate. The effect of Derrida’s
own sensuous semiotics is of an animal whose bounds one should not presume oneself
to be separate from nor yet, at the same time, to be able to caress or to contain in its
entirety – and here, lessons about visiting orcas, taunting glaciers and marrying bears
become especially instructive. The supplement that becomes the phenomenological prede-
cessor or skin prefacing the animal itself can only be presumed to be anterior to the animal
from inside its own body. This requires a form of penetration that is also, in turn, a haptic
exploration of the underside of the hide – or of the matrix of narrative transformation
from the inside – where we gestate into something new.
In more literal terms, translation might thus be conceived of, at best, as a practice of
cultural appropriation of a fidelity to narratives that is factually focussed, but also always
less faithful to the contexts and content of the narratives as they were transcribed than it
is ever possible to convey. What is left to us, then, is splicing that has always already fully
undergone transcription. This goes all the way back to the irreplaceable specificity of the
oratorical event, as the Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer (1987, 7) suggest when they write
that “[a]t each stage of the recording of oral literature, something gets lost”, and all the
way forward with each ou/topian reading. Thus, the true text is divided semantically into
its factual attention to the source language and its inevitable infidelities to the same in
desiring to reproduce even sacrificially, “giving to read”. Naturally, the reception of
such a work must be divided, which brings us to Bringhurst’s translations. Perhaps
Bringhurst opts to function as a pharmakon, maker, who is also a pharmakos, scapegoat,
for the sake of the pharmakeia, the work itself. His Haida translations are thus pharma-
ceutical, or a “partial cure”, extending in practice but excising in publication the full
Haida-language narratives, perhaps for reasons of economy. Yet both politically and
artistically, these translations endure and continue to motivate critical and community
responses.
If one could combine these perspectives made text – the events of translations, both
Enrico’s and Bringhurst’s works – this might lead to a renewed sense of presence: not
by undoing textualization, but by breathing into texts an intersemiotic form of translation
that acknowledges collaborative meaning-making by insisting upon the absolute value of
relationships, rather than ignoring the “unseen” – where source languages, cultures and
communities are flattened by invisibility and thus presumed and so rendered into a stand-
ing reserve of mythic tissue that is contained by barrier-membranes of time, space and
copyright law. In an insistence upon relationships, repetition must play out again and
again in the form of retranslation, in combination with its movement backwards
towards the source language, in a way that might engender increasingly multifaceted
histos, text(ure)s. I would like to suggest that final forms in the “presentation and dissemi-
nation of texts and performances” in print (Finnegan 1992, 199) should be hoped never to
come to exist.
Wild pansies are always already seeds that were and will be wild pansies. Transform-
ation is always already transformed. Translation, likewise, requires a relational form of
dissemination, but non-originary and non-essentializing. Re-imagination, combined
with retranslation, could result, with hard work, in the translation of dominant-framework
dilemmas into Indigenous systems of thought. Thus, especially in the case of oral
literatures, due to the way that the oral recedes from the senses in textualized form,
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 15

dual-language publications are far more useful – more vital – than single-language trans-
lations. Source languages should not be excised from the bodies of books, regardless of the
costs of publication. But neither should the liveliness of language be ignored for the sake of
instrumentalities ethical, disciplinary or otherwise. Narrative revitalization is far more
vital when the seeds contain their matrices.

Notes
1. Throughout this article, I cite Bringhurst’s translations of Ghandl’s and Skaay’s stories with
their names listed as the authors.
2. Reciprocity is not the same as a commodity exchange and may subvert it; as Vicente Rafael
(1998, 135) writes of Tagalog and Spanish, dominant-language terms can become, in trans-
lation, a form of resistance. In Guujaaw’s (1995, viii) context, where the stories in Enrico’s
books “represent incorporeal properties, valued above material wealth”, the reader is
already called upon to reciprocate: “only a certain amount can be represented on a page.
The rest is up to you.” The intangible cultural wealth and accompanying Haida protocols
for sharing this wealth permit the formation of a generous form of debt: “After this, when
you look upon the images associated with our culture, they might even wink at you.”
3. The means of production of texts can always be “reappropriated” in powerful and unexpected
new ways by Indigenous artists and elders practising the ongoing and vital work of teaching
and imagining. As Margery Fee (2000, 150) notes, storytellers such as Harry Robinson and
those recorded by Julie Cruikshank (1998) “knew that ranching and storytelling were both
labour, and that both produced value”. The question is always for whom. See also Abel
(2013).
4. I acknowledge the difficulty of quoting Benjamin in translation, and of course this is a diffi-
culty that must be noted throughout this article in relation to all the translated texts I work
with: one cannot delimit Benjamin’s intended meanings, or the meanings of any translated
work, and this difficulty is part of his power, and that of all such works. We cannot delimit,
but we can, and I think must, retranslate.
5. At the same time, this instrumental approach, while affirming a historical source, is still
inevitably interpretive even in pre-translation practices such as transcription: how narrowly
to transcribe the phonological details of the language event, where to place lexical boundaries
to form words and how to punctuate oral meaning on the page? As Giorgio Agamben (2006)
notes in his critique of Euro-Western language philosophy, “grammatical and logical cat-
egories and grammatical and logical reflections are originally implicated one in the other,
and thus they are inseparable … These categories are not properly either logical or gramma-
tical, but they make possible every grammar and every logic, and, perhaps, every episteme in
general” (20). See Maya Chacaby’s (2015, 4) incisive and vivid article on the “myth of benign
translatability” for further thoughts on the effects of an aggressive grammatical and transla-
torial “treatment” for the language of the “Crippled Two-tongue”, the “one who don’t speak
good English an’ don’t speak much Indian, ya know, eh?”. Guujaaw (1995, vii) identifies this
same issue, while also affirming the value of the stories in written form, when he writes:
“Open this box of treasures and know that our story has always been the spoken word, ani-
mated with subtleties and emotions that don’t translate into print.”
6. The pharmakon can be both poison and cure, and it is important to emphasize the uncanny,
selective work of this conceptual “pesticide”.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
16 J. SPENCER

Note on contributor
Jasmine Spencer is a postdoctoral fellow studying Indigenous literatures and specializing in Dene/
Athabaskan languages and literatures.

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