A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst

A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst

The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians from the fall of 1900 through the summer of 1901. Together they created a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form.

Having worked for many years with these century-old manuscripts, linguist and poet Robert Bringhurst brings both rigorous scholarship and a literary voice to the English translation of John Swanton's careful work. He sets the stories in a rich context that reaches out to dozens of native oral literatures and to myth-telling traditions around the globe.

Attractively redesigned, this collection of First Nations oral literature is an important cultural record for future generations of Haida, scholars and other interested readers. It won the Edward Sapir Prize, awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and it was chosen as the Literary Editor's Book of the Year by the Times of London.

Bringhurst brings these works to life in the English language and sets them in a context just as rich as the stories themselves one that reaches out to dozens of Native American oral literatures, and to mythtelling traditions around the world.

Robert Bringhurst is a well-known author, poet, and typographer from Canada. He is the author of The Elements of Typographic Style, a bestselling book on typography, as well as other works of prose and poetry. He's also a skilled translator and linguist, with works in Haida, Navajo, classical Greek, and Arabic under his belt.