Emil Afraid-Of-Hawk's style (A Personal Impression)

[Clive Bloomfield]

Dear Alfred chiye na khola, You may well be right - I think I am  
getting an inkling of what you are alluding to there. The use of  
language itself, the Lakhota structures employed seem to me such a  
highly sophisticated, "virtuoso" performance in the language, as it  
were, by someone who understands Lakhota at such a profound "gut"  
level, that one feels it could only emanate from the pen of a native,  
(& we even have his name), and yet ..... there does seem to be a  
certain dissonance between the cultural context & background of a  
Lakhota native speaker of the 1940's, and the "mental world" of that  
text. One realizes he is translating a European text, but that seems,  
to me at any rate, quite inadequate to account for what I am  
convinced is the disparity of "calibre" & quality between the  
Original (which IS worthy, but fairly banal & unpretentious) & the  
Version (which belongs in a different literary class altogether, in  
my view.) It is really quite an enigma to me. He must have had a  
marvellously original mind, I fancy! Being a pretty useful  
interpreter, by all accounts, he must have had more than a little  
linguistic insight, (not to mention talent.) But sometimes as we all  
know, brilliance can seem sometimes, inexplicably, to emerge from  
"nowhere" - this world is "passing strange" at times, is it not?.  
Perhaps I AM overstating my case, but it is a pretty difficult one to  
substantiate without something like a statistical (word/phrase/ 
construction-frequency-based) stylistic analysis of the entire text,  
and a detailed comparison of it with other modern Lakhota prose  
compositions. That class of text does not exactly seem to be a huge  
field though, does it? Until I know better, I will continue studying  
& learning from Mr. Emil Afraid-Of-Hawk's beautiful, layered  
sentences with excited fascination! It's a bit like trying to "prove"  
that an impressionist painting (say), or a violin partita is a  
masterpiece : One either "feels" it, or don't bother! Enthusiasm is  
great, but I would like to be able to back up intuitions with hard  
facts!        Toksha akhe wanunkichiyankin kte lo, Clive.
On 02/07/2006, at 8:15 PM, A.W. Tüting wrote:

> Clive chiye,
>
> I was well aware of 'stirring up your contradiction' by using this  
> short term of 'European-style' ;-) which actually doesn't cover  
> exactly what I wanted to express with it. The text is best Lakota  
> in structure and syntax - but, IMVHO, it's the quite sophisticated  
> ('epic') way of displaying the narration (as you call it yourself:  
> 'cinematic'!) that to me seems like having its roots in the Old  
> World, so to speak ('European-style' is too narrow a term for it  
> and doesn't really express what I mean). Okay, that's only my very  
> personal feeling and perception :)
>
> T. a.
>
> Alfred
>
> P.S. I wouldn't have expected a narrative style like this in a  
> Native American language as I e.g. hadn't  in 'classical' Chinese.
>
>
> Am 02.07.2006 um 10:45 schrieb Clive Bloomfield:
>
>> Hello Alfred & friends, If you mean the Lakota text is 'European- 
>> style' in the sense that it was a work of European literary FORM  
>> (novel/novella), which Emil Afraid-of-hawk was "translating" back  
>> in the 1940's, then I totally agree with you. But that seems to me  
>> the only European thing about it, (apart from the Roman  
>> alphabet) :  the grammatical structure & syntax of his sentences,  
>> his "Weltanschauung" (if you like) seem,IMHO, "echt-Lakhota",  
>> being in my view completely unlike the grammatical/thought  
>> structure of any European language of which I am aware, (...)