Exactly What I Said

Translating Words and Worlds

Elizabeth Yeoman

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780887552731
• eBook ISBN:
  9780887552762
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"You don't have to use the exact same words.… But it has to mean exactly what I said." Thus began the ten-year collaboration between Innu elder and activist Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue and Memorial University professor Elizabeth Yeoman that produced the celebrated Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, an English-language edition of Penashue's journals, originally written in Innu-aimun during her decades of struggle for Innu sovereignty.

Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds reflects on that collaboration and what Yeoman learned from it. It is about naming, mapping, and storytelling; about photographs, collaborative authorship, and voice; about walking together on the land and what can be learned along the way. Combining theory with personal narrative, Yeoman weaves together ideas, memories, and experiences––of home and place, of stories and songs, of looking and listening––to interrogate the challenges and ethics of translation.

Examining what it means to relate whole worlds across the boundaries of language, culture, and history, Exactly What I Said offers an accessible, engaging reflection on respectful and responsible translation and collaboration.

Index

A

Abitibi-Témiscamingue, 190–192

ableism, 63

Acadians, 19

activism. see also protesting: disability rights, 226; importance of photography in, 94; and languages, 115; poetry as, 131–132; re-enactment as, 76; the subaltern, 166; translators and, 106; Tshaukuesh and, 210; walking with as, 62–63; writing as form of, 12, 70, 205

Adams, Evan, 120

Agreement in Principle in 2004 (Quebec), 36

Ahenakew, Cash, 140

Ahmed, Sara, 15

Akami-Uapishk^u, 2, 3, 34, 39

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 193

Andreotti, Vanessa, 140

Andrew, Aputet (Ben), 138

Andrew, Michel, 58, 62

Andrew, Sylvestre, 28

Angilirq, Paul Apak, 77, 82–83

Anthropocene (Burtynsky), 99

the Anthropocene (Capitalocene), 55, 63, 86. see also capitalism

Antle, Angela, 67–69

Apter, Emily, 107

Armitage, Peter, 41

Arnait, Before Tomorrow, 75–76

Ashini, Tanien, 134

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Kunuk), 76, 79, 82–83, 89, 132–133

Audet, Véronique, 183

Ayaruaq, John, 74

Aylward, Christopher, 138–139

B

Bacon, Joséphine: Indigenous poetics, 81; Je m’appelle humain (Call Me Human) (O’Bomsawin), 70; “Language and the Land,” 174–175, 178–179; Nipishapui nete mushuat, 135; on nutshimit, 134; in Paris, 71, 178; poetry of, 70–71, 72–73; on reasons to write in French or Innu, 131; reconciliations, 13; on the word “sauvage,” 134; as source material for learning to translate, 125; translator of diaries of Tshaukuesh, 121–122; Vaudrin-Charette translating, 170–171

Baichwal, Jennifer, 99–100

Balakrishnan, Gopal, 193

B and B Commission, 118–119, 120

Baraby, Anne-Marie, 150–151

Barham, Scott, 34, 35, 47

Barks, Coleman, 125–126, 127, 129

Barthes, Roland, 105, 187–188

Battiste, Marie, 144, 176

Before Tomorrow (Arnait), 75–76

Belcourt, Christi, 28, 34–35, 47

Bell, Lynne, 176

Benjamin, Walter, 129

the Beothuk: about, 137–138; as Innu, 138–139; Spirit of the Beothuk (Squires), 105–106, 107, 137

Berger, John, 108

biculturalism, 118–119. see also multiculturalism

Blackwater, Andy, 66

Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer), 211

Brazilian rain forest, 213

Brody, Hugh, 59–60, 65–66, 132, 193

Bubandt, Nils, 55

Buber, Martin, 169

Burtynsky, Edward, 98–99, 100, 103

C

Canada Council, 83, 173

Canadian Geographical Names Database (Natural Resources Canada), 27

Canadian studies, 88–89

capitalism, 63, 108, 166–167. see also Anthropocene

Capitalocene, 86. see also Anthropocene

CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 1, 5...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on the Cover
• Map
• Introduction
• One - Mapping
• Two - Walking
• Three - Stories
• Four - Looking
• Five - Signs
• Six - Literacies
• Seven - Listening
• Eight - Songs
• Nine - Wilderness
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index