Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Ishi's Tale of Lizard Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 23 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 15:11:49 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:21:15 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:21:15

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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—— 298 Herbert Luthin and Leanne Hinton What seems at first a hopeless déja vu of motifs and situations proves now ° be quite the opposite: a carefully controlled narration of great balance and ignity. When I first went to work on this story, some nine years ago now, I felt it to be one of the bleakest accounts of survival I had ever seen —a relentless tale of repetitive drudgery and danger. Now, looking at it anew, I see it in a different light. Like a Beowulf or a Roland in European tradition, Lizard represents the essence of a Yahi culture hero. Lizard provides for his people, unfailingly. Instead of despair, there is reassurance in these unvarying routines, and in Lizard’s unflappable reliability in a crisis. And in truth I think Ishi, as the only able-bodied man among his lost band of survivors for all those long, tean years of hiding, must have been something of a Lizard himself. A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION Because so much has been said for and about Ishi, and so little has ever come forth from Ishi himself, we have felt a special urgency, in dealing with the records he left behind, to let Ishi be heard in his own voice and words at last. Granted, proclamations like this have a hollow ring when the end result is a translation. After all, what Ishi actually said in “A Story of Lizard” (as in these lines from the very beginning of the myth) was this:4 Hiri’, héebil’ k hiri’mawna... Kal? Niwilji, wisdw’ gi iwilch. Nildopji’. Domjawaldi’ k diitel*. (Héok’awdubalgu’ gi wéeyump’; déowayalcidibil’ wéeyump*.) Béot’an’ c wisti, Juspja’, jost’al’. Jewdo ¢ yonbal’, Jéduwoo’ k Busdim’ c Yaa’! Since there is no one left alive who can speak or understand this language, the need for translation is unimpeachable, Still, we have wanted to minimize the deTHESTORY OF LIZARD 299 gree to which the voices of translation mingle with Ishi’s own. So where, in most other literary translations, obscure or ambiguous sentences are silently clarified — with the addition of a phrase or transition here, a “she said” there — we have chosen another tack. Though this is still a literary — nota literal ~ translation, we have nonetheless tried to convey only what is present in the Yahi text, just as Ishi dictated it to Sapir in 1915. That means that we have had to explore other methods of providing readers with the interpretive and textual information they need in order to follow the story. We have settled on two devices, footnotes and sidenotes, to help us “buy” this degree of fidelity. The sidenotes (set in the right margin, in space fortuitously made available by the broken-line format of the translation) are used mostly to supply key missing information ~ primarily proper names or specific nouns that are referred to only by pronoun in the original, and which the reader might have trouble intuiting. Less critical information — of a contextual, interpretive, linguistic, or philological nature has been consigned to footnotes. To illustrate the way the sidenotes work (the footnotes should need no explanation), let's take a look at an excerpt (lines 138-249) from the translation: He made himself arrows in the morning. He rubbed them and smoothed them. the cane shafis of the arrows He was busy at it all day — finished. As he turned them on the ground, he painted on the bands. He finished putting on the painted bands, He soaked them in water, the feathers wrapped them on with sinew — finished. He trimmed the feather-vanes — with a flint blade finished. At line 139, while the reader can certainly deduce that the pronoun “them” refers generally to the arrows of the preceding line, the sidenote allows us to provide a bit more specificity: it’s the cane shafts of the arrows that Lizard is smoothing, as Sapir’s fieldnotes indicate. At line 145, the reader may be forgiven for being puzzled as to the referent for the pronoun “them.” But a quick glance to the side supplies that information right when it’s needed, and it saves us from having to falsify the text by interpolating the missing referent (either with distracting brackets, or, worse, without them) into the line: that is, “He soaked the feathers in water.” Our unembellished translation makes it clear that Ishi himself, to