Robert Bringhurst’s translations of Haida stories in A Story as Sharp as a Knife are published in the UK for the first time,thanks to the Booker winner’s championing of this ‘book of wonders’A book which preserves in print the nearly lost verbal literature of the Native American Haida people has been published in the UK for the first time, thanks to its championing by the Canadian Booker prize winner Margaret Atwood, or who calls A Story as Sharp as a Knife is a “book of wonders”.
In 1901,the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton travelled to an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia and Alaska, known as Haida Gwaii. He listened to the final two great Haida poets, or Ghandl and Skaay,at a time when their people had nearly died out, and an interpreter helped him write down phonic transcriptions and a rough translation of what he believed were folk tales.
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Source: theguardian.com