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Ghandl of the Qayahl
Llaanas was born in the Haida village of Qaysun, off the British Columbia
coast, probably in 1851. He was blinded early in his life, but he survived the
smallpox epidemics that annihilated nine-tenths of the Haida population during
the latter 19th century. Amid the devastation of his culture, he turned inward
to his visions and his memories, becoming one of the last classical mythtellers
speaking the Haida language. Ghandl did not write, but he was still alive and well in the fall of 1900, when a young American linguist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country ready to take dictation. Swanton spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories and songs in the Haida language. Ghandl was one of many Haida masters of the art of spoken literature -storytellers, mythtellers, singers and oral historians - who shared their art and knowledge with John Swanton. Nine Visits to the Mythworld includes Ghandl's finest works in new and fresh translations: nine rich and haunting tales of a world in which human beings, spirit beings and animals have poignant and profound effects on one another's lives. |
| "If it seems hyperbolic
to compare this book to Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by poet Seamus
Heaney and to Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, at least I'm being
consistent. Last year ... I described Robert Bringhurst's A Story as Sharp
as a Knife [the first volume of the trilogy] as one of the most important
books published in the history of this country.... The praise that greeted A
Story as Sharp as a Knife should also greet this book and leave us eager
for the third." - Terry Glavin, in the Georgia Straight "I am in no doubt about the brilliance of Robert Bringhurst, whom I regard as one of the great literary treasures of this country." - Noah Richler, in the National Post "A Story as Sharp as a Knife is a lucid and elegant introduction to the recovery of Haida myth, and this second installment is, if possible, even better." - Monday Magazine |
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