Nils-Aslak Valkeapää
Overzicht titels:
Oorspronkelijke titel: Beaivi, Áhcážan 1988
Vertaling: Ralph Salisbury, 1997
Uitgever: DAT
ISBN-10: 82-90625-32-4
ISBN-13: 978-82-90625-32-5
Flaptekst:
(De vertaling is niet voorzien van een flaptekst. Hier geven we een korte introductie
Originally published in 1988, the Sami edition of these poems won the Nordic Council's Literary Award. It was intended by the poet as the modern re-telling of a Sami myth for the benefit of the Sami people, whose language has been supressed for several centuries. During the last thirty years efforts to revive Sami culture have yielded such faithful translations as this, which preserves the songlike cadence of the Sami vocal tradition and permits a natural, unstudied reading of the poem.
Beaivi, áhcázan was awarded with the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 1991. This collection of short poems, accompanied by photographs of the Sami taken between the 1860s and 1930s, was lauded for uniting past and present, fact and fiction, to reveal the richness of Sami culture, history and language.
The original edition is remarkable in that it contains a huge collection of historical photographs of the Sami people, and it is important to keep in mind that the poems are written as a kind of dialogue with, or commentary to, the historical material contained in the images. The Scandinavian edition of this book, translated from Sami into both Norwegian and Swedish, does not contain the historical photographs, neither does the English edition, and this is on the insistence on the poet. Nils-Aslak Valkeapää argues that the photographs belong to the Sami people alone.
Oorspronkelijke titel: Ruoktu váimmus 1985
Vertaling: Ralph Salisbury, 1994
Uitgever: DAT
ISBN-10: 82-90625-21-9
ISBN-13: 978-82-90625-21-9
Flaptekst:
"Until now the intense, direct, sudden lyrical poetry of the Sámi people (as they prefer to be called, rather than Lapps), the rich tradition of the yoik, has been all but unknown to readers of English. The yoiks have a kinship with other high lyrical forms of oral poetry
with the poems of the Inuit, for instance, and with what we can hear of the nomadic peoples of the Arab world and the songs of Native Americans. Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa was bom into a reindeer-breeding family, trained as a teacher, became a visual artist. His poems rise directly from the yoik tradition, at once intimately personal, traditional and evocative of a huge landscape.
Ralph Salisbury, Lars Nordstrom and Harald Gaski have done us a service in bringing these poems and these qualities of them into English."
