Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

18. A Life in Translation

A Life in Translation Richard J. Preston Introduction When I was a child, I made about thirty solitary trips between my divorced parents, one in Chicago, the other in Fort Collins, Colorado, on the Union Pacific Streamliner City of Denver. Each trip was a thousand miles all by myself, and they were great adventures that I looked forward to eagerly. And at night, in an upper bunk, I would slide open the small window and look out through the darkness rushing by, and see in the distance a house, visible only by a lighted window or two. I used to wonder what it was like, living in those prairie farmhouses—how life looked from the inside of other people’s homes. As an adult, after several brief careers and adventures, I wound up making about thirty trips to James Bay, in northwestern Quebec and northeastern Ontario. There I and (often) my family sojourned in Cree coastal communities where it became my vocation to try to understand what it had been like living the traditional seasonal round in the bush—how life looked from the inside of other people’s homes. Near the end of my first summer at Waskaganish, I had the great good fortune to find a mentor in John Blackned, a man who was born in the bush in about 1894. When I first met him, he was sixty-nine, and was regarded in his and other Cree communities as a remarkable repository of traditional knowledge. For seven summers during the 1960s, I learned to be his scribe, recording in careful detail all that he wanted to tell me. I continued to see John during my later, more brief trips, speaking of points 419 in the stories and getting a few additions. John aged well and continued to go to the bush into his nineties, with his two unmarried sons. Although he has no direct descendants, my recordings of his voice, telling his stories , remain available in the Cree region and in archives. At the time of this writing, I have spent forty-five years thinking and writing about those stories, and so now you can understand my choice of the title of this chapter. It does not require forty-five years to do this, but that’s just the way it has worked out. From the first story John told me, I was intensely interested and, to the extent that I was able, vicariously followed the paths of the events he related. Sometime in the third summer of my fieldwork, my understanding “broke through” when I had learned— actually become immersed in—enough narratives for them to, in some sense, substantially cross-reference their meanings and implications of meaning within my mind. I had a moment of epiphany that I still regard as a spiritual experience, when my normal, more-or-less intellectual recognition of the coherence of a story gave way to a welling up into consciousness that silently but clearly said the words “Yes, that makes sense . . . and it really does.” The next forty-two years brought some additional depth of insight, several fruitful surprises, even some small epiphanies, but no great revelations. I was not then, and am not now, fluent in Cree (or any language other than English), and this has necessarily limited my ability to see more deeply and accurately. Indeed, Crees who interpreted for me were sometimes hard put to understand the meaning and implication behind or beyond John’s words, and I know of only one non-Cree whose fluency I regard as adequate to the task. Fluency is crucially important, but it is always , even at its best, a limited facility to mix and match words about experience . While I had four graduate courses in linguistics, and have taught it, I did not do any serious linguistic analysis in Cree, and have found only modest help from the many professionals who have done very good work in Cree linguistics. The gap is deep between language regarded primarily as a code to be contemplated and language in action as a vehicle for conveying experience. My task here is to try to explain my perspective—or how I regarded, respected, and re-presented the stories for an audience that may never see the places or experience the “old ways” Cree culture that John experienced . The translation of Cree words was done by Crees who knew English, but the translation beyond the words, of the experiences that the 420 Preston [18.217...