American Indian Verse Translations

Abstract

A STRANGE CULTURE is precious; its strangeness gives us distance from ourselves. The translator, then, begins with certain problems: he must keep the strangeness of the culture while he makes its language familiar. And as he makes the language familiar he may take other liberties-with idioms, images, allusions, genre, tone-all justified in the name of easier access to the work. Yet when access becomes too easy, strangeness is lost. At the moment our bookstores are filled with accessible Poetry. Translators of American Indian verse, trying to change an oral multi-media original (often a combination of song, drama, and dance) into printed English poetry, have frequently adopted two related practices that produce unusually free translations: they write into the text hidden meanings (Natalie Curtis) known to the Indians but not explicitly expressed in the original words, and they take great liberties with the language and form of the original in an attempt to express its in what Rothenberg calls a total translation. This liberating quest for the spirit of the original may loosen up a translation long after its first printing; recently a number of editors with little or no knowledge of Indian languages have rewritten older