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Nils-Aslak Valkeapää: The sun, my father

Titel: The sun, my father
Oorspronkelijke titel: Beaivi, Áhcážan, 1988
Vertaald uit het Samisch door: Ralph Salisbury
Genre: poezie
Uitgever: DAT, 1997
ISBN10: 8290625324

Flaptekst / Beschrijving

(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.