Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

478 Chapter 17
phrases—that defined cultural competence in performance of the narrative
(ibid.:908).
A key method of text analysis in ethnopoetics is text presentation. As
Sherzer discovered, verse breaks in Kuna narratives are determined by regular
turn-taking between narrating chief and responding chief. In presenting Chief
Olopinikwa’s performance in print, Sherzer begins each line of the main narrative
flush left and indents the lines of the responding chief.
A few years earlier, in his presentation of The Hot Pepper Story, Sherzer
(1990:178) used a highly literal translation. In the original text, there are many
repetitions of a small number of words and themes. Sherzer felt that a liberal
translation would fail to capture the poetics of performance, so in his commentary
he describes the thematic elements in the text but uses the device of literalness
in the translation to draw the reader’s attention to those elements.
Translations are texts in their own right and can be analyzed just as original
texts can. William Hanks (1988) reviewed Munroe Edmonson’s (1986) translation
of The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Edmonson had translated
and annotated the original Mayan corpus into 5,514 lines of text, changing the
format of presentation in the process. In the original, the lines had run clear
across the page, but Edmonson presented the text in short lines to emphasize
what he considered to be the verse structure. Hanks analyzed not only the
Mayan text but the literary style that Edmonson used in his presentation. This
method, of course, is well known from generations of work on literary criticism
applied to translations (Rose 1997) and on linguistics applied to translation.
(See Nida and Taber [1969] and Nida [1975] for the classic work here.)
In translating Ñähñu (Otomí) parables, folktales, and jokes, Jesús Salinas
and I presented a fully literal translation and a fully liberal translation, in addition
to a transcription of the Ñähñu (Bernard and Salinas 1976). Figure 17.1
is a piece of the text from that effort:
At the time, I felt that I couldn’t show some of the characteristics of the
original, idiomatic Ñähñu in a free, idiomatic English translation, so I suggested
to Salinas that we present both, along with a literal translation from
Ñähñu to English. That way, readers could decide for themselves if my idiomatic
translation from Ñähñu to English made sense. (The original publication,
in fact, was marked for tone and for pauses, which I’ve left out here.)
Later, in translating Salinas’s four-volume ethnography of the Ñähñu, I didn’t
have the luxury of including either the Ñähñu or a literal translation, and so I
settled on a middle course: The English is idiomatic and grammatical but I
tried deliberately to reflect Salinas’s style (see Bernard and Salinas 1989).
We’re still experimenting with methods for presenting texts of indigenous
performance that capture the subtleties of performance. We can’t know for
sure if a particular presentation actually captures the regular features of narrative,
but the same could be said for any interpretive effort in which anthropol-