A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, 1)

545 Pages·2011·15.411 MB·English

by  Robert Bringhurst

“Robert Bringhurst comes to us like night lightning: the dark
is suddenly lit by language beautifully crafted and by rivet-
ing thought. He writes for the eye, the ear, and the mind all
at once, and he doesn’t waste a sentence.” barry Lopez
“Bringhurst’s work encompasses the world with its passion-
ate curiosity; its breadth and depth, its miraculous clarity
and complexity, the blend of head and heart, make it, in my
mind, completely unique.” erica wagner, in The Times of London
F
bringhurst
rom the fall of 1900 through the summer of
1901, linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dicta-
tion from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets
a
and historians. His Haida hosts and colleagues had been
raised in a wholly oral world where the mythic and the per-
the
sonal interpenetrate completely. They joined forces with a s to ry
story
their visitor, consciously creating a great treasury of Haida
oral literature in written form. Poet and linguist Robert
classIcal
Bringhurst brings these century-old works to life in the
English language, setting them in a context just as rich as as t h e c L a s s i c a L
the stories themselves—one that reaches out to dozens of
haIDa
Native American oral literatures and to mythtelling tradi- a s s h a r p a s
tions around the globe. sharp
Mythtellers
robert bringhurst is one of Canada’s most respected
h a i da m y t h t e L Le r s
poets and most probing cultural historians. His transla- a s a
tions of Haida oral poetry have appeared in major scholarly
anD theIr a k n i f e
journals and in Brian Swann’s groundbreaking anthology
Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native kn i f e
Literatures of North America.
worlD
a n d t h e i r wo r L d
b
Douglas & McIntyre $24.95
D&M Publishers Inc.
Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley robert br inghur st
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
Cover design by Naomi MacDougall 2nd edition “Bringhurst’s achievement is gigantic, as well as heroic.”
Front cover photograph ©The Field Museum, #A102063
Printed and bound in Canada
dougLas & margaret atwood
Printed on fsc-certified paper
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West mcintyre
StoryAsKnifeFinalCover.indd 1 09/12/10 2:18 PM
a story as sharp as a knife
the classical haida mythtellers
and their world
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 1 01/12/2010 2:54:41 PM
Praise for a story as sharp as a knife
“One of the most important books to grace Canadian literature in
many years.… Bringhurst offers new translations of such penetrating
beauty that they fully justify his contention that Haida poetry is, at its
best, great art.” —john bemrose, inMaclean’s
“Just about every verse is touched with magic.… The voices of the
Haida glow in this book.” —hugh brody, in theNational Post
“What a charge this discovery sent through me! The brilliant analysis
of myth and culture will find its place alongside such popular inves-
tigations as Radin’s The Trickster, Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand
Faces, Santillana & von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill or Lévi-Strauss’s The
Raw and the Cooked.… A Story as Sharp as a Knife will make academ-
ics tremble with jealousy and students of mythtelling shiver with
excitement.” —brian brett, inBooks in Canada
“Bringhurst’s accomplishment is beyond praise. His translations are
spare and eloquent; his commentary is judicious and invariably
thought-provoking; his breadth of reference is startling.… Meticu-
lously and beautifully produced, A Story as Sharp as a Knife merits a
wide readership and a passionate response. It also deserves to win
every literary award in sight.”
—mark abley, in theMontreal Gazette
“Bringhurst, I believe, is one of the country’s literary treasures, quite
possibly a genius.… [His] great endeavour, the one by which he stands
to be remembered, is A Story as Sharp as a Knife.” —noah richler,
This Is My Country, What’s Yours?: A Literary Atlas of Canada
“A beautiful weave of poetry anthology, poetics and anthropological
adventure, it’s a vivid journey of the imagination.… It’s dense, it’s lush,
it’s a whole world to live in.” —Toronto Star
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“For twelve years Bringhurst — with the aid of many helpers — hacked
his way through the brambles of the staggeringly difficult language,
rubbed the tarnished old lamp, prised the cork out of the bottle.…
As in the tale of Aladdin, out came the genie. And one humd inger of
a genie it is.… Bringhurst’s achievement is gigantic, as well as heroic.
It’s one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head — a
profound meditation on the nature of oral poetry and myth, and on
the habits of thought and feeling that inform them.”
— margaret atwood, Writing with Intent
“Robert Bringhurst comes to us like night lightning : the dark is sud-
denly lit by language beautifully crafted and by riveting thought. He
writes for the eye, the ear, and the mind all at once, and he doesn’t
waste a sentence. His insights into story are engaging, the range
of his imagination impressive, his tone friendly. Like Gary Snyder,
he is a polymath whose particular convergence of knowledge is
unique and whose ability to convey knowledge about subjects as
diverse as classical music and Native American thought is singular.”
— barry lopez
“Once in a while a book appears that changes the way we see things.
This is such a book. Bringhurst reclaims an extraordinary body of
literature and teaches us to hear its sinewy, haunting music. In the
process, he rewrites North American literary history and lays a depth
charge in the assumptions of cultural anthropology. Rigorous and
enchanting, A Story as Sharp as a Knife is a superb adventure of the
mind and imagination. I couldn’t put it down.” — dennis lee
“The translation is linguistically accurate as well as poetically exquisite ;
the narrative and notes render the retranslated Haida poetry acces-
sible for the first time to a larger Canadian public, both Native and
non-Native. Bringhurst sets a new standard for scholars in and out of
the academy : to write well does not preclude rigorous cutting-edge
scholarship.” — prof. regna darnell, Founding Director, First
Nations Studies Program, University of Western Ontario
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 3 01/12/2010 2:54:42 PM
Masterworks
of the Classical Haida Mythtellers
volume 1
A Story as Sharp as a Knife:
The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
volume 2
Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas,
Nine Visits to the Mythworld
volume 3
Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay,
Being in Being
SharpKnife-5585-24.indd 4 01/12/2010 2:54:42 PM
A Soy
as Sharp as a Knife
The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World
second edition
Robert Bringhurst
Douglas & McIntyre
d&m Publishers inc.
Vancouver / Toronto / Berkeley
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Copyright © 1999, 2011 Robert Bringhurst Cataloguing data available from Library and
Archives Canada
11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1 isbn 978-1-55365-839-9 (pbk.)
isbn 978-1-55365-890-0 (ebook)
All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval Cover design : Naomi MacDougall
system or transmitted, in any form or Book typography : Robert Bringhurst
by any means, without the prior written The text face is Aldus Nova, designed by
consent of the publisher or a licence from Hermann Zapf. Haida quotations, captions
The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency and supplementary matter are set in the
(Access Copyright). For a copyright same designer’s Palatino Sans.
licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or
call toll free to 1-800-893-5777. Cover art : Detail of The Raven and His
Bracket Fungus Steersman. Argillite
douglas & mcintyre plate carved by Daxhiigang, circa 1882.
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc. Cover photograph © The Field Museum,
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201 No. a102063.
Vancouver BC Canada v5t 4s7 Other photo credits are listed on page 529.
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
We gratefully acknowledge the financial Text printed on acid-free, 100% post-
support of the Canada Council for the consumer paper
Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, Distributed in the U.S. by
the Province of British Columbia through Publishers Group West
the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the
mix
Government of Canada through the Paper
fsc™ c016245
Canada Book Fund for our publishing
activities.
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In memoriam
bill reid
of the Qqaadasghu Qiighawaay
of the village of Ttanuu,
whose names were
Iihljiwaas, Kihlguulins, Yaahl Sghwaansing,
1920–1998
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Contents
Preface to the Second Edition 10
Prologue : Reading What Cannot Be Written 13
1 Goose Food 29
2 Spoken Music 51
3 The One They Hand Along 65
4 Wealth Has Big Eyes 102
5 Oral Tradition and the Individual Talent 113
6 The Anthropologist and the Dogfish 139
7 Who’s Related to Whom ? 157
8 The Epic Dream 174
9 The Shaping of the Canon 200
10 The Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu 212
11 You Are That Too 223
12 Sleek Blue Beings 237
13 The Iridescent Silence of the Trickster 263
14 The Last People in the World 277
15 A Knife That Could Open Its Mouth 297
16 The Historian of Ttanuu 317
17 Chase What’s Gone 333
8
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a story as sharp as a knife
18 A Blue Hole in the Heart 341
19 The Prosody of Meaning 362
20 Shellheap of the Spirit-Beings 373
21 1 November 1908 385
22 How the Town Mother’s Wife Became
the Widow of Her Husband’s Sister’s Sons 395
Political Afterword 419
Appendix 1: Spelling, Pronunciation and
Native American Typography 425
Appendix 2: Haida Geography and Village Names 436
Appendix 3: The Structure of Skaay’s Raven Travelling 438
Notes to the Text 443
Bibliography 501
Acknowledgements 527
Photo Credits 529
Index 531

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