Robert Bringhurst
Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature:
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Robert Bringhurst
(b.1946). Born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Utah, Montana, and Wyoming, he moved with his parents to Alberta, Canada, in 1952; but since the 1970s he has lived in British Columbia. He has studied widely in a variety of disciplines: architecture, physics, and linguistics (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology); philosophy and oriental languages (at the University of Utah); Arabic language and Islamic history (at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, California). Bringhurst has a B.A. in comparative literatures (1973) from Indiana University and an M.F.A. in poetry (1975) from the University of British Columbia. He began learning Haida, with the further intention, ‘no matter how preposterous and impossible it might be—to learn all the words and all the grammars of the world.’ A cultural historian, he is as much at ease with Aztec theology as with modern French poets. Our literary culture, he insists, is enriched by our knowledge of the past.
Bringhurst's poems are complex, but tend to fall into four main patterns. First are the dramatic monologues spoken by characters as diverse as Moses, Jacob, and Petrarch. A second group of poems is erudite and difficult, though not obscure, with elusive, often enigmatic references to pre-Socratic philosophers, Egyptian pharoahs, and primitive South American gods. A third group includes haunting poems with strong individual images, precise, often stark diction, and controlled lines. Much of his poetry in the 1980s—including ‘The blue roofs of Japan: a score for interpenetrating voices’, which won the 1985 cbc Poetry Prize and was published as a book in 1986, ‘New World suite #3’, and ‘Lyall island variations’—has been written for polyphonic performance by multiple voices. He has published more than a dozen books of poetry since 1972, including Bergschrund (1975), Tzuhalem's mountain (1982), The beauty of the weapons: selected poems 1972–82 (1982), Pieces of map, pieces of music (1986, which includes an autobiographical ‘meditation’ and an interview on his working methods), Conversations with a toad (1987), and The calling: selected poems 1970–1995 (1995), which make abundantly clear Bringhurst's masterful use of images, rhythm, and sound to illuminate his erudite subjects.
Many of Bringhurst's long poems—such as Cadastre (1973), Deuteronomy (1974), Jacob singing (1977), The stonecutter's horses (1977), and T (1983)—appear in limited fine editions, often on handmade paper in chapbooks designed by himself.
In prose Bringhurst has published a number of books on Aboriginal and European cultural history. These include The raven steals the light (1984), an extraordinary cycle of ten illustrated Trickster stories from Haida mythology, written in collaboration with Haida sculptor and artist Bill Reid; and a study of Haida art and culture, The black canoe (1991).
An authority on letterforms, limited editions, antiquarian books, and book design, he published a monograph, Shovels, shoes, and the slow rotation of letters: a feuilleton in honour of John Dreyfuss (1986); The elements of typographic style (1992); and he edited T (1996), a tribute to Swiss modernist typographer Jan Tschichold.
With Doris Shadbolt, Geoffrey James, and Russell Keziere, Bringhurst edited Visions:contemporary art in Canada (1983), a major work on Canadian visual art since 1945. He wrote the text for an exhibition of B.C. literary and small-press publishing, Ocean, paper, stone (1984), a catalogue important for establishing the primacy of B.C. as a centre for creative writing since the 1950s.(See Peter Sanger, ‘Poor man's art: on the poetry of Robert Bringhurst’, The Antigonish Review 85/86 (Spring/Summer 1991).)
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Robert Bringhurst
| Robert Bringhurst | |
|---|---|
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| Born | October 16, 1946 Los Angeles, California, United States of America |
| Residence | Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Occupation | poet, typographer, author |
| Spouse | Jan Zwicky |
Robert Bringhurst is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He is the author of The Elements of Typographic Style – a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type. A lifelong student of languages, Bringhurst has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo, as well as classical Greek and Arabic.
He lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, British Columbia (approximately 170 km northwest of Vancouver) with his wife Jan Zwicky, a poet and philosopher.
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Life
Born in Los Angeles, California, he was raised in Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Alberta, and British Columbia. Bringhurst studied architecture, linguistics, and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and comparative literature and philosophy at the University of Utah. He holds a BA from Indiana University, and a MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. In 2006, he was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Fraser Valley[1] .
Bringhurst has taught literature, art history and history of typography at several universities and held fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Literary Career
All facets of Bringhurst’s work have been widely acclaimed. His 1992 publication, The Elements of Typographic Style has been called “the finest book ever written about typography” by type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.[2] A collection of his poetry, The Beauty of the Weapons was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award in 1982, and A Story as Sharp as a Knife, his work on Haida symbolism, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2000. Bringhurst won the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence in 2005, an award which recognizes British Columbia writers who have contributed to the development of literary excellence in the Province.
Work in Haida
Bringhurst, a talented linguist, has translated works from classical Greek, Arabic, Navajo, and most significantly, Haida. His interest in Haida culture stemmed from his friendship and close association with the influential Haida artist Bill Reid, with whom he wrote The Raven Steals the Light in 1984, among several other significant collaborations. It was this friendship that in 1987 “started Bringhurst on the philanthropic endeavour of recording the Haida canon”. The result of this labour was an almost universally lauded trilogy of works collectively titled Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers.
Bringhurst's translations have been credited as helping to reinvigorate the Haida culture and language, which in 1991 was considered "likely to be lost unless strong efforts are made very quickly to perpetuate them".[3] However, what controversy Bringhurst’s writing has attracted is focused on this same work in Haida. Bringhurst has been accused of academic exploitation and cultural appropriation.[4] In 2001, the CBC radio program Ideas aired a two part series called “Land to Stand On” featuring “a string of Haida claiming in the series' first episode that Bringhurst's work is ‘about keeping us in our place,’ written ‘without asking us,’" and "replete with ‘serious errors twisting it into the poetry that he wants,’”.[5]
Despite his few spirited detractors, negative attitudes towards Bringhurst have gained little if any traction in published discourse. Rather the opposite, Bringhurst has been defended and praised in print media. Not least among these voices is Margaret Atwood, who believes that “territorial squabbling cannot obscure the fact that Bringhurst’s achievement is gigantic as well as heroic”, and that far from appropriating native voices, Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers “restores to life two exceptional poets we ought to know”.[6] The aforementioned CBC documentary was attacked in print for relying "entirely on the fallacy, convenient to the producers, that Bringhurst had not consulted with any Haida". In reality, Bringhurst with the help of Bill Reid had spent the better part of the previous decade working with members of the Haida community.[7]
For his part, Bringhurst believes that "culture is not genetic" and that he is paying respect to Native American languages like Haida by allowing works from those languages to be appreciated as art by as wide an audience as possible.[8] He always intended his translations to be "[exercises] in literary history, not in the interpretation of present-day Haida culture."[9]
Bibliography
Poetry
- The Shipwright's Log – 1972
- Cadastre – 1973
- Eight Objects – 1975
- Bergschrund – 1975
- Tzuhalem's Mountain – 1982
- The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–82 – 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award), 1985 (Copper Canyon Press)
- Tending the Fire – 1985
- The Blue Roofs of Japan – 1986 (Barbarian Press)
- Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music – 1986, 1987 (Copper Canyon Press)
- Conversations with a Toad – 1987
- The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–1995 – 1995
- Elements (with drawings by Ulf Nilsen) – 1995
- The Book of Silences – 2001
- Ursa Major – 2003 (shortlisted for the 2004 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize)
- New World Suite Number Three: A poem in four movements for three voices – 2006
- Selected Poems – (Gaspereau Press) 2009
- Selected Poems – (Jonathan Cape) 2010
- Selected Poems – (Copper Canyon Press) 2012
Prose
- Ocean/Paper/Stone – 1984
- The Raven Steals the Light (with Bill Reid) – 1984
- Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters – 1986
- The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii (with photographs by Ulli Steltzer) – 1991
- Boats Is Saintlier than Captains: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Morality, Language, and Design – 1997
- Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities – 1998
- A Short History of the Printed Word (with Warren Chappell) – 1999
- A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World – 1999, 2nd ed. 2011 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
- The Elements of Typographic Style – 1992, revised 1996, 2004, 2005 and 2008
- The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning – 2004
- The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks – 2006
- Everywhere Being is Dancing – 2007
- The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada – 2008
- What Is Reading For? – 2011
Translation
- The latter two volumes of the trilogy entitled Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers.
- The first volume, A Story as Sharp as a Knife is Bringhurst's prose work about Haida literature, and is not primarily a work of translation.
- Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, Nine Visits to the Mythworld – (a collection of stories by the mythteller Ghandl, as collected in 1900 by John Reed Swanton[10]) – 2000 (shortlisted for the 2001 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize)
- Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, Being in Being: The Collected Works of a Master Haida Mythteller – 2001 (a collection of stories by the mythteller Skaay, as collected by John Reed Swanton)
- Parmenides, The Fragments – 2003
- Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, Siixha / Floating Overhead: The Qquna Cycle §3.3 – 2007
Edited Works
- Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada – 1983
- Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design – 1991
- Bill Reid, Solitary Raven: The Essential Writings – 2000, 2nd ed. 2009
- Carving the Elements: A Companion to the Fragments of Parmenides – 2004
- François Mandeville, This Is What They Say, translated from Chipewyan by Ron Scollon. – 2009
- Kay Amert, The Scythe and the Rabbit: Simon de Colines and the Culture of the Book in Renaissance Paris – 2012
References
- ^ Russell, Anne. "UCFV honorary doctorate: Robert Bringhurst". http://www.ufv.ca/MarCom/newsroom/Bringhurst.htm. Retrieved 20 February 2012.
- ^ "Frequently Asked Questions". Hoefler & Frere-Jones. http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php. Retrieved 10/2/2012.
- ^ [Kinkade, M. Dale. 1991. The Decline of Native Languages in Canada. In: Endangered Languages. R.H. Robins and E.M. Uhlenbeck (eds). Berg Publishers.]
- ^ Bradley, Nicholas R., 1967- Remembering Offence: Robert Bringhurst and the Ethical Challenge of Cultural Appropriation University of Toronto Quarterly - Volume 76, Number 3, Summer 2007, pp. 890-912
- ^ Richler, Noah (8/11/2001). "Where Two Cultures Meet, Complainers Arise: The Charge That Robert Bringhurst Is Appropriating Haida Myths Is Absurd". National Post: A:21.
- ^ Atwood, Margaret (28/2/2004). "Uncovered: An American Iliad". The Times (London): Review 10–11.
- ^ Richler, Noah (8/11/2001). "Where Two Cultures Meet, Complainers Arise: The Charge That Robert Bringhurst Is Appropriating Haida Myths Is Absurd". National Post: A:21.
- ^ "Prize-Winning Poet". As It Happens. CBC Radio. 22 April 2011. http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2011/04/22/friday-april-22-2011/. Retrieved 21 February 2012.
- ^ Richler, Noah (8/11/2001). "Where Two Cultures Meet, Complainers Arise: The Charge That Robert Bringhurst Is Appropriating Haida Myths Is Absurd". National Post: A:21.
- ^ Northwest Coast Books: Nine Visits to the Mythworld
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