Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, Vol. 2)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1550548034 ISBN 13: 9781550548037

Publisher: Roundhouse Publishing, 2001

In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language. Swanton met a number of fine mythtellers during his year in the Haida country. Each had his own style and his own repertoire. Two of them -- a blind man in his fifties by the name of Ghandl, and a crippled septuagenarian named Skaay -- were artists of extraordinary stature, revered in their own communities and admired ever since by the few specialists aware of their great legacy.

Nine Visits to the Mythworld includes all the finest works of one of these master mythtellers. In November 1900, when Ghandl dictated these nine stories, the Haida world lay in ruins. Wave upon wave of smallpox and other diseases, rapacious commercial exploitation by fur traders, whalers and miners, and relentless missionization by the church had taken a huge toll on Haida culture. Yet in the blind poetï??s mind, the great tradition lived, and in his voice it comes alive. Robert Bringhurstï??s eloquent and vivid translations of these works are supplemented by explanatory notes that supply the needed background information, and by photographs of masterworks of Haida visual art, in which the stories Ghandl tells are given potent visual form.

About the Author:

Robert Bringhurst is one of Canada's most respected poets and most probing cultural historians. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, lectured on Native American art and oral literature at universities around the world, studied linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, and worked as a professional translator for Arabic and Greek. 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)