Michael Lake Reviews:

Elizabeth Yeoman, Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds, University of Manitoba Press, 2022
Tim Bowling, The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary, Wolsak & Wynn, 2022

In 2019, retired Memorial University professor Elizabeth Yeoman worked with Innu elder and activist Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue to create the book Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, a collaborative translation of Penashue’s journals. Yeoman’s latest book revisits that partnership in order to examine the challenges and complexities that come with translating an Indigenous language.

Yeoman and Penashue first met in 2008, when Yeoman was invited to join an annual weeks-long walk in Innusi (Innu territory), led by Penashue since the 1990s. Yeoman’s journals from the walk serve as the preface to this book, providing a snapshot of the two women’s friendship, which would continue to fuel their work together for the next 13 years. 

‘We did not have a strong common language,’ Yeoman writes. It is this very cultural and linguistic divide which, rather than prohibit translation, becomes rich terrain for a much more profound understanding. Early in their work together, Penashue gave Yeoman a note that read, ‘You don’t have to write exactly what I said because my English is not that good. You can use different words but it has to mean exactly what I said.’ Yeoman does not take this request lightly; not only does she spend the next decade undertaking the translation of the journals, but she also continues that work in Exactly What I Said.

To this end, the book is presented in nine cohesive chapters, providing a framework for translating Indigenous languages that is much wider in scope than merely the written word. Yeoman considers such subjects as mapping, looking, signs, literacies, songs and wilderness as essential access points to a holistic representation of Indigenous stories and knowledge. At the centre of each of these investigations is an interrogation of colonialist assumptions about authorship, storytelling and standardized language as well as an understanding that any single approach to such translation is insufficient. 

Yeoman’s writing is decidedly academic yet always accessible. She is able to achieve this balance by weaving personal reflections and anecdotes of her time in Innusi within the framework of translation studies. Her approach to translation never values theoretical concerns above the individuals and communities she is translating on behalf of. This is perhaps the guiding principle of the book: that to elevate the translation over what is being translated is to misunderstand the endeavour altogether. Yeoman is deeply concerned with the real harm and erasure such an oversight can cause. What is lost in this translation is of utmost concern.

Exactly What I Said is a useful addition to the body of literature on translation studies and its ethics and simultaneously a much more human story of two very different women finding ways to share of themselves across cultural boundaries, and how doing so can be an act of love, understanding and decolonization.

‘We had this in common,’ writes Yeoman, ‘our amazement at what we experienced in worlds outside our own when we found the courage to venture into them, though for very different reasons. We also had in common a sense of the significance of her story and the desire to make it available for people to read and for posterity.’

Yeoman’s approach to translation is one that values care, attention to accuracy and an understanding that ‘the ways we use language are intrinsically related to the ways we live on the Earth.’ One can only hope that others seeking to translate Indigenous languages undertake the work with the same diligence and thoughtfulness this book offers its subject as well as its readers.

Sharing something of a sensibility with Yeoman, Tim Bowling’s latest book, The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, is concerned with history, representation and authenticity. Where Yeoman addresses the ways in which a culture can be represented to a world outside of it, Bowling examines how the individual can understand themselves by looking outside to the culture. 

The first part of Bowling’s essay collection consists of nine dazzling short pieces on topics as varied as Buster Keaton, love letters, hockey, handwriting and nationalism. Each of these essays is brief, no more than a few pages apiece, and meanders through connections and impressions that evoke an idea rather than offer conclusions about them.

The book’s title comes from the essay ‘Of Cherry Trees and Red-Winged Blackbirds,’ an ode to his mother, to nostalgia and to the red-winged blackbird, so ubiquitous in Canada. ‘There you have the joy of being a child who can climb to a treetop in seconds,’ Bowling writes, ‘and the sadness of an adult who hasn’t even contemplated such a move in decades.’ Isn’t that the truth? At their best, the essays in the first section showcase Bowling’s fine ability to conjure the mindset of youth imbued with the wisdom of middle-age while avoiding the trappings of nostalgia and sentimentality. 

The remaining three-quarters of the book are devoted entirely to the sprawling, exploratory essay ‘The Hermit’s Smoke.’ Evoking themes from the previous entries—nature, childhood, wonder and awe—the writing revolves around the main figure of the hermit, society’s often-romanticized outcast.

Told in three parts, the essay begins by recounting the story of the night in Bowling’s childhood when he, along with his father and the local doctor, travelled to aid a dying man on the island where he had taken up hermitage for much of his life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this encounter becomes formative to Bowling’s worldview; not only has he, a 12-year-old child, witnessed the death of another human, he is also faced with the unknowability of the hermit, whose very existence is a challenge to society’s expectations of how one is to live and die in the world. 

Bowling was indelibly changed by his experience on the hermit’s island, but what can a child really understand of the hermit’s life or the human impulse to turn away from society and live deliberately outside of it? In the final passage of this section, Bowling manages to beautifully capture the swirling confusion of the child who has just acquired some profound knowledge of the world before having the wisdom to understand its meaning. ‘And though I continued to walk in the way of the world for decades,’ Bowling writes, ‘I already bore my share of the heavy casket on my shoulder, even if youth closed my senses to all the hungers, failures and urgencies of age, even if the hermit’s eyes, within my eyes, hadn’t yet opened to erode the hours, one by remarkable one.’

Somewhat disappointingly, Bowling doesn’t spend any more time on the biography of Alf Harley, the hermit of his youth, or make any attempt to understand his particular motives. The why of the hermit is not the concern here, and the switch back to Bowling’s interior world is at first jarring. Instead, the remaining pages are given over to a deep dive into the idea of hermitage and solitude as it relates to the author’s own life and worldview. 

Employing the same loose, free-associative thinking of the book’s first essays, Bowling combs through history, literature, science and philosophy, searching for hermits to help him understand. He simultaneously chronicles his own attempt to replicate some semblance of a hermit’s life in his own days, which he does by walking alone for hours at night, sleeping on the couch and ignoring emails and work obligations. It is a somewhat preposterous undertaking, with no real importance other than Bowling’s commitment to it, but it is written in such quick-moving and kaleidoscopic prose that it’s perpetually delightful to surrender to Bowling’s eccentric thinking.

However the reader might feel about this writerly pet project Bowling has imposed on himself, not to mention the fact that nearly every source he digs up is a white male of some means and privilege, Bowling manages to sustain interest. More than a historical or literary examination of hermitage, his essay collection is a portrait of an intelligent and perceptive man carefully, quietly, observing and contemplating the world around him.

—Michael Lake