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

by Robert Bringhurst

Book Overview

A seminal collection of Haida myths and legends; now in a gorgeous new package. The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians from the fall of 1900 through the summer of 1901. Together they created a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form. Having worked for many years with these century-old manuscripts, linguist and poet Robert Bringhurst brings both...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1553658396
• ISBN13: 9781553658399
• Release Date: April 2011
• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Astounding Journey

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

The first volume in an essential series

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

Listening to the music of thought

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.