A Story as Sharp as a Knife

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Haida carving, especially totem poles, has become well known to North
Americans in recent decades, but Haida literature is still a foreign
concept to most readers. In A Story as Sharp as a Knife, poet,
translator, and cultural historian Robert Bringhurst strives to bridge
the gaps. Bringhurst has published translations of Haida oral poetry and
has lectured at universities around the world on Haida traditions and on
North American art.

In his prologue, “Reading What Cannot Be Written,” the author
offers a basic orientation: all classical Haida literature is oral. The
translator introduces what he calls “the intellectual richness of a
world where no books exist” and acknowledges the difficulty most
readers have in dissociating themselves from “the fixed and silent
texts that have come to overshadow every other kind of literature in the
European tradition.” Indeed, Bringhurst finds Haida oral literature to
be closer in spirit and form to European painting and music than to
European literature.

Bringhurst’s sources are oral texts transcribed in 1900–01 in Haida
Gwai by Harvard ethnographer John Swanton, who aspired to turn these
texts into English and give them the necessary context. Both men view
the tales as a rich classical literature embodying one of the world’s
great mythologies. The tales and scholarly text will be strange but
fascinating to many readers.