Bringing a genius out of the shadows
B.C.’s Bringhurst a transmitter for all peoples
Over the years Robert Bringhurst of Quadra Island, B. C., has been quietly honoured for his work as a poet, translator, designer and cultural historian. He’s translated from classical Greek, Arabic, Haida and Navajo. In 1992 he wrote The Elements of Typographic Style, which was enthusiastically reviewed in several countries and has gone into four editions.
While he’s now wellknown in several specialized fields, his remarkable range of abilities has never brought him the fame that his admirers think he deserves. He remains, they sometimes say, “a shadowy figure” to the general public. He is famously obscure.
Nonetheless, 15 of those who do know a good deal about Bringhurst have contributed to an excellent book about him, titled Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst ( McGill- Queen’s University Press), edited by Brent Wood of the University of Toronto and Mark Dickinson of OCAD University.
Their book sharpens the outline of his accomplishments without over- simplifying the nature of his ideas and intentions. His life, as much as his list of talents, is unique. For most of his 69 years he’s so avidly pursued his curiosity that he’s acquired a richly eclectic field of vision. A truly exceptional human emerges from this book.
He was born in Los Angeles in 1946 ( he became a Canadian in 1982). His father was a salesman who kept moving the family from place to place through Robert’s childhood – from Calgary to Salt Lake City and four different homes in Montana. When he was seven he spent the summer with a Navajo family in southern Utah – and never again felt “alien in a native household.” He learned that his maternal grandfather was abandoned as a baby, left in a field in Oklahoma. That made him, in Bringhurst’s view, “the perfect ancestor” because he inherited no traditions that he needed to maintain. He could start from scratch.
In Salt Lake City, his school friends couldn’t help noticing t hat he shared few of their interests. They found him likable but hard to understand. In the 1960s everybody learned to play guitar, usually to play rock. Bringhurst showed no interest in the youth culture of the 1960s. So he played classical guitar.
TO STAND SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE GREAT MYTH-BASED ARTISTIC CREATIONS OF THE WORLD. — MARGARET ATWOOD
He spent much of his time exploring the canyons of southern Utah, searching out the pictographs on the walls. They hinted at a universe of imagery he was drawn to but couldn’t understand. He was searching in a similar way through Ezra Pound’s Cantos. From Pound he learned that literature was a world much larger than he had guessed. At the same time he was absorbing the work of D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese author who preached the virtues of Zen Buddhism to young North Americans.
His attraction to literature stimulated an engagement with linguistics. As a student, he met Noam Chomsky, then the great prince of linguists, who informed him that you can’t know anything about language if all the languages you know are from the same family. That was one reason Bringhurst set to work on Arabic.
It was a large challenge, as well as the entry point to a quite different family. “Arabic was hard,” he said. “The first thing I had ever done that was hard.” Later he wandered through the Middle East and expanded his feeling for Arabic by living for a while in a Lebanese village.
In the late Bill Reid, a Haida artist, Bringhurst found a mentor who could escort him t hrough t he puzzles of another difficult culture: Haida. Together in 1984 they wrote a book about Haida myths, The Raven Steals the Light. That led Bringhurst to an appreciation of Haida stories and to the long labour that produced the trilogy, Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers.
Bringhurst was often in Reid’s studio when he was working on his big sculpture for the Canadian embassy in Washington. It depicts a canoe crowded with figures from Haida myth: Mouse Woman, Wolf, Raven and others. They have scattered after the destruction of their world and are adrift in the future. Bringhurst described the sculpture and the myths it arose from, published as The Black Canoe in 1991.
But Masterworks of the Classical Haida generated a rather nasty little controversy centred around the theory of “cultural expropriation.” Put simply, it tried to outlaw translations and adaptations by authors who did not belong to the communities they used. The fact that this practice has enriched cultures around the world for centuries was simply ignored by certain theorists. Among a few critics, Bringhurst was accused of stealing from the Haida.
The best answer to these specific charges came from a 2004 article by Margaret Atwood in t he London Times. Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, she wrote, “goes beyond its culture of origin to stand side by side with the great myth- based artistic creations of the world.” She said it “restores to life two exceptional poets we ought to know.” Named Skaay and Ghandl, they were Haida poets in the oral tradition whose stories were copied down by a scholar decades ago, t hen developed by Bringhurst in an Englishlanguage version. “Bringhurst’s achievement is gigantic,” Atwood wrote.
In his own poetry, Bringhurst has experimented with work in which two or more voices are heard at once. Listening for the Heartbeat includes Dennis Lee’s enthusiastic praise for this promising turn in the history of poetry. Meanwhile, Bringhurst has yet another hugely ambitious project on the way, an encyclopedia of oral literatures and major authors of indigenous North America. He has 800 pages written but intends to produce about 200 more entries. He’s probably the only individual alive who could write such a book.