“My tongue, my own thing”: Reading Sanaaq

• Published in: TTR
• Main Author: Henitiuk, Valerie
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Association canadienne de traductologie 2016
• Subjects: translation; Inuit; Mitiarjuk; Sanaaq; gender; traduction; genre; Découverte; Strauss; inuit; inuite; inuktitut
• Online Access: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1051012ar; https://doi.org/10.7202/1051012ar

Mitiarjuk, who has been called the “accidental Inuit novelist” (Martin, 2014), began writing Sanaaq in the mid-1950s and was “discovered” in the late 1960s by a doctoral student of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Bernard Saladin d’Anglure took up this text as his anthropology thesis topic, guided its completion, arranged for its 1984 publication in Inuktitut syllabics, and in 2002 published a French translation; his own former student, Peter Frost, has recently (2013) translated the French version into English. Without the training and tools that would equip an outsider to appreciate Inuit writing and the oral traditions from which it arises, and to judge it on its own merits, scholarly assessment by other than specialist anthropologists or ethnographers has often been felt to be beyond the reach of southerners. Nonetheless, a younger generation of literary scholars such as Keavy Martin, inspired by the work of J. Edward Chamberlin, Robert Allen Warrior and Craig Womack, are working to redress such attitudes. Bringing to bear for the first time the perspective of translation studies, this paper will suggest some ways we can move from ethnography’s purported aim of a systematic study of people and cultures to a rigorous and ethical study of these translated texts, reading them explicitly asliterature, as well as (and perhaps more importantly) asliterary translations. Mitiarjuk, surnommée « the accidental Inuit novelist » (Martin, 2014), a commencé à écrire Sanaaq au milieu des années 1950 et a été « découverte » à la fin des années 1960 par un étudiant de Claude Lévi-Strauss. Bernard Saladin d'Anglure a repris ce texte comme sujet de thèse en anthropologie, en a guidé l’achèvement, a organisé sa publication en 1984 en écriture syllabique inuktitute et en a publié une traduction française en 2002. Peter Frost, ancien étudiant de Saladin d'Anglure, a pour sa part traduit la version française en anglais en 2013. L’étude de la littérature inuite est souvent considérée comme hors de portée des chercheurs non autochtones ou qui ...