Looking up from the work on my desk—the pleasing, illuminating but demanding scrutiny of draft translations by Spanish poet and translator Jordi Doce of some of my poems for a small bilingual edition to be published in Spain by Littera Libros—I see in the books around me so many extraneous attractions, distractions.  Projects as yet unfinished–that’s the connotation of the particular books nearest at hand, many from the university library. One in particular that I happen to find myself looking at (I would like to figure out what unconscious train of thought led me to look at it unaware, and then come to awareness that I was looking at it) makes me feel that it is an enormous privilege to be able to hold it in my own hands and make use of it.  It comes from very far away and long ago.

I hesitate even to name it, but really I shouldn’t worry that anyone who might read these words of mine would ever covet it, although surely it is rare. To me it seems far more precious than the money that would be required to replace it, if that were possible: Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1918, Volume XIV: Eskimo Songs, subtitled Songs of the Copper Eskimos, by Helen H. Roberts and D. Jenness, Southern Party—1913-16. Published in Ottawa by F. A. Acland, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1925. Yes, of course, already one thinks of it as the fruit of colonization within a country’s own borders–no matter how much one might be grateful for traces of the amazingly intrepid Copper Eskimos and, for that matter, the Euro-Canadians who trekked long and hard to get to Canadian Arctic in 1913!

And one knows that the collection of the songs must have been flawed, that at least some songs would never have been sung to them, and that others would only have been sung in a way that did not violate their special qualities, perhaps sacred or shamanistic, and that the relations between anthropologists and indigenous people must have been fraught with manipulation on both sides, power on one side, lack of it on the other. How accurate are the transcriptions and translations of the songs? And what particular preparations, circumstances, distractions, difficulties, of the Southern Party (on “the Arctic mainland and the adjacent islands”) might have made their findings more useful or less, to those who want, nearly a hundred years later, to ponder their document?  Producing this songbook, bigger in trim size than a hymnal and fully as thick, was a terribly complex project and must have required the most extraordinary meticulousness, patience, keenness, stamina, and seriousness, with its musical scores, charts presenting musical analysis, a beautiful hand-written transcription (in an alphabet evidently invented for a language with phonemes beyond those of English), of the verse running beneath the musical notes in each song.  And at the back, for each, there is an italicized transliteration of the verse and a translation into English.

I tracked this book down by following a lead in the work of Brian Swann, poet and long-time student and champion of Native American poetry.  Severed from the singers, from the time and world and life experience and cultural practices and thought of those singers, the songs are cryptic—and perhaps some of their mystery is the result of imperfect translation.   But I rather think that it comes from the prior fact that the anthropologists had little in their own lives that corresponded to that far northern world, experience, culture, thought, singing and perhaps–to use a phrase from classics–”song culture.”  Even what seems cryptic to us might have been well translated in some terms, but it came into a language and a culture that had no way to understand fully what it was encountering.  And I would think that the anthropologists themselves acknowledged that.

Sung by a girl from Prince Albert Sound, here is a song that begins with many repetitions of syllables that perhaps express at the least the presence and the emphatic effort of the singer: ye ye yai ye ya i ya ye yai ya and more. Such are the “prelude” and “refrain.” The verses are these:

1.1 Seeing that I was longing for it,

I gave it a name, this spirit.

1.2 Much blood pours from me [my nose] unexpectedly.

I gave it a name, seeing that I recognized it.

2.1 I have not finished it [my song] however.

Whither my little sister, my little Kaniraq [has she gone].

2.2 Much blood pours from me unexpectedly.

Whither my little sister–I have not finished it however.

There are ways of thinking about this, especially with the ways of reading poetry, that make it begin to signify obliquely and powerfully.  And Freud to one side, Jung to another, are looking on as we think.  As are scholars of oral culture and of ancient poetry in the west.

The collectors of the songs write in a footnote: “This is one of the songs that was taught by the Prince Albert sound Eskimos to the ******* [I cannot reproduce this word, which uses characters of a non-Roman alphabet invented to represent the indigenous] Eskimos during the summer of 1915. The words are said to have been taken from three separate songs.”

What, you may wonder, is my interest in this book? I admit that this celebration of it is for its own sake. But there is yet another project awaiting me in which I take up the search for a particular metaphor through a few disparate cultures, trying to think with that metaphor about writing.  Perhaps at some point I will report on what I was beginning to find when other duties intervened, many months ago, and other duties intervened upon those, and so on, preventing me from finishing my song.  Or rather, I seem to have invited my own self-preventing.  I think I felt it would take longer to think through this problem that I would be able to sustain my thinking.

Anyway, now I go back to translations that press me more urgently…