Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (English, Haida and Haida Edition) - Hardcover

Bringhurst, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1550546961 ISBN 13: 9781550546965

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

The Haida world is a misty archipelago a hundred stormy miles off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. For more than a thousand years before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished on these islands. In 1900 and 1901 the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last traditional Haida-speaking storytellers, poets, and historians. Robert Bringhurst worked for many years with these manuscripts, and here he brings them to life in the English language. A Story as Sharp as a Knife brings a lifetime of passion and a broad array of skills—humanistic, scientific, and poetic—to focus on a rich and powerful tradition that the world has long ignored.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Bringhurst is one of Canada's most respected poets, designers and most probing cultural historians. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, lectured on Native American art and oral literature at universities around the world, studies linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, and worked as a professional translator from Arabic and Greek.He is the author of the bestselling treatise on typography Elements of Typographic Style.

Bringhurst began to study the Haida language in 1982. His translations of Haida oral poetry have since appeared in major scholarly journals and in Brian Swann's groundbreaking anthology Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)

About this edition

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1550546961
• ISBN 13: 9781550546965
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 527