Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

13. Translating Tense and Aspect in Tlingit Narratives

Translating Tense and Aspect in Tlingit Narratives Richard L. Dauenhauer and Nora Marks Dauenhauer In memory of Ron Scollon (1939–2009) Part One: The Critical Challenge I. So I am in the eighth grade and I am assigned this book report and I write about Damon Runyon short stories and I begin it like this: “I am in the library last week and I see this book and I check it out.”1 My book report was severely red-penciled by my teacher, although she lightened up at the end when she saw what I was trying to do. I learned from the experiment not to mix genre and style, but to use the style appropriate to the genre and level of formality. This is a message that comes early and stays late in our schooling, including the academic writing we are trained to do, and— perish the thought—translation. I learned that one does not attempt pastiche to meet an expository writing assignment. On the other hand, we commonly use the present tense in English-language narratives, but usually only when telling funny stories. “This guy walks into a bar and says to the bartender,” and so forth. The frame is set for humor. But we use the present tense for serious themes as well—the historical present: “It is early evening and President Lincoln is heading to Ford Theater,” or, “President Kennedy’s motorcade is slowly working its way through Dallas.” We noticed some time ago that Tlingit verb tense and aspect are not only different from English linguistic structure but are used differently in narrative structure. Briefly stated, Tlingit narrators tend to use the perfective aspect of the main verb to advance the story, and the imperfective 301 aspect to fill in detail at that stage before moving on. Within this larger imperfective narrative space created by the perfective aspect of the main verb moving the text forward, there are more subtle patterns of repetitive forms, including perfective and imperfective habitual; progressive and decessive epimodes; a range of epiaspect durative suffixes used with both perfective and imperfective verbs; and the creation of secondary imperfectives by adding any of various durative suffixes. In Tlingit, this pattern is used for comic and tragic narratives alike. The question arises as to how to translate these imperfective forms into English without coding some undesired or unintended meta-messages.2 II. The Tlingit perfective very roughly equates to the English past tense, and the Tlingit imperfective to the present, with the major distinction that where the English verb system is time based, Tlingit is aspect based. Our linguistic treatment here is admittedly oversimplified. The bottom line is that all English verbs are marked for time in ways that Tlingit verbs are not. Conversely, Tlingit verbs are marked for other things that are not always easily expressed in English, or even expressible at all. English is time based: “This article would have been being written last summer”— and we wait for the other shoe to drop—“except I got lazy.” All languages have their special ways of making certain distinctions, some of which are translatable, some not. For example, “Do you eat pork?” versus “Are you eating pork?” Or “Do you speak German?” versus “Are you speaking German?” Or “I stopped to smoke” versus “I stopped smoking.” We are frequently asked to translate titles of conferences and similar events into Tlingit. Typically the English phrases have snappy-sounding gerunds, such as “Supporting Our Troops.” These require a paraphrase in Tlingit, a choice of forms such as “We are supporting,” “Let’s support,” “We will support,” and so on. Where the narrative distribution of Tlingit perfective and imperfective parallel English style, there is no problem translating, but where they do not parallel English style, how do we translate into English without sending the wrong signals? How do we use the English imperfective in a serious story without making the storyteller sound illiterate; or, conversely , how do we use a perfective without making a funny story sound serious where it shouldn’t? For example, even where Tlingit Raven stories are outrageously funny, non-Native audiences often feel uneasy laughing, 302 Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer because they erroneously think that Raven is some kind of god-figure and that laughing would be disrespectful or even sacrilegious. Although we did not entirely ignore this problem in the past, we are only now starting to take a...