the birds and the bees: issues in translating an aboriginal song text from north-west australia...

The birds and the bees: issues in translating an Aboriginal song text from north-west Australia

Michael Walsh

AIATSIS Centre for Australian Languages,

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

28 March 2014 Session: Language, Story and Song

AIATSIS National Indigenous Studies 2014 Conference, National Convention Centre, Canberra

Abstract

Translation is a significant challenge for the documentation of Aboriginal songs. This paper will present an explication de texte for a particular Aboriginal song from north-west Australia. The targeted song text only contains a small number of words so that a translation of just those words will not convey much to an outsider. The song is embedded in a rich cultural context which Murrinh-Patha people will acquire as increasingly richer content over a lifetime. Central to this song text is the sugarbag or wild honey totem, thithay. This totem connects with a particular clan and particular places in the clan territory. Those particularities can be invoked by the mere mention of ngarim ‘bee sp.’. But this mention also invokes a whole range of totems possessed by clan members including certain bird species. Roughly comparable is the extent to which the mere mention of certain key terms in the Western literary canon can invoke a rich array of allusions. For example, the mention of Achilles and Patroclus invokes varying portions of the Iliad – the variation dependent on the background and interests of the listener. For the translator the challenge is how much of the rich cultural context should be included.

Wadeye Song Documentation Project

.

4

Wadeye in regional context

Wadeye (Port Keats)• Aboriginal community of about 2000 people• Originally established as Port Keats Roman Catholic

mission, 1935• Lies within clan estate of Dimirnin clan but 20 other

clans now resident there• Various different ancestral languages, but Murriny

Patha is lingua franca and L1 for young people of all clans– One of the healthiest Indigenous languages in

Australia• Social tensions arising from historical enmities

between clans perpetuated in contemporary gangs etc.5

• Murriny Patha– Djanba– Wurltjirri– Malgarrin

• Marri Ngarr– Muyil Lirrga

• Rak Thangkurral (Marri Tjevin, Marri Ammu)– Walakandha wangga– Ma-Yawa wangga

• Murriny Nyuwan– Balga

Tharrmandji terert(song genres)

Base map adapted fromMap 5.4, Furlan2005, p. 197

Tharrmandji i kardu wardangatha(Songs and clan country)

Djanba

• Dimirnin• Nangu• Maniny• Kirnmu• Kultjil• Wakal Tjinang

The text

From p. 16 of Barwick, L, Blythe, J, Marett, A & Walsh, M 2007 'Arriving, digging, performing, returning: an exercise in rich interpretation of a djanba song text in the sound archive of the Wadeye Knowledge Centre, Northern Territory of Australia', in R. M. Moyle (ed.), Oceanic Encounters: Festschrift for Mervyn McLean, Research in Anthropology and Linguistics Monographs, Auckland. 13-24.

Contexts

clans: person-totem-place

generic: Djanba – Lirrga – Malgarrin – Wurlthirri

musical: instrumentation; melody etc

body painting: [separate slides: lirrga vs djanba]

dance [separate slides]

bark painting [separate slides]

geographical: an intimately familiar landscape

totemic: each person has a set of totems

dreamings: entities in the everywhere and everywhen

clans: person-

totem-place

From the pre-publication 2nd, expanded edition of Ward, Teresa 1983 The Peoples and their Land around Wadeye: Murrinh Kanhi-ka Kardu i Da ngarra Putek Pigunu. Port Keats via Darwin: Wadeye Press.

• Murriny Patha– Djanba– Wurltjirri– Malgarrin

• Marri Ngarr– Muyil Lirrga

• Rak Thangkurral (Marri Tjevin, Marri Ammu)– Walakandha wangga– Ma-Yawa wangga

• Murriny Nyuwan– Balga

generic contexts: Tharrmandji terert(song genres)

musicalinstrumentation [clapsticks and body percussion for Djanba but no didjeridu vs Lirrga and Wangga always with didjeridu]; melody etc

From pp. 19-20 of Barwick, L, Blythe, J, Marett, A & Walsh, M 2007 'Arriving, digging, performing, returning: an exercise in rich interpretation of a djanba song text in the sound archive of the Wadeye Knowledge Centre, Northern Territory of Australia', in R. M. Moyle (ed.), Oceanic Encounters: Festschrift for Mervyn McLean, Research in Anthropology and Linguistics Monographs, Auckland. 13-24.

Body painting: Lirrga

Body painting: Djanba

Dreamings: entities in the everywhere and everywhen

The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen. We should be very wrong to read into it the idea of a Golden Age, or a Garden of Eden, though it was an age of Heroes, when the ancestors did marvellous things that men can no longer do. The blacks are not at all insensitive to Mary Webb’s ‘wistfulness that is the past’, but they did not, in aversion from present or future, look back on it with yearning and nostalgia. Yet it has for them an unchallengeable sacred authority.

(Stanner, W. E. H. 2010 [1956] The Dreaming. In The Dreaming & Other Essays. 2nd edition, Collingwood: Black Inc., 58.)

totemic


ku tek

Bark Paint-ings


Geographical

Furlan, Alberto 2005 Songs of continuity and change: the reproduction of Aboriginal culture through traditional and popular music. PhD thesis, University of Sydney, p 184

24

Wadeye in regional context

Ambiguities

Past participial semantic differentiation

Compliment to executioner:

Well hanged!

Past participial semantic differentiation

Compliment to executioner:

Well hanged!

Compliment to gallery owner:

Well hung!

Interpretations

Allusions: place – totem – person

orange blossom – red loincloth – body painting – “lack” of didjeridu –birds – bees –

and the intensely personal

Interlude: marramarda “progeny”

a speculative etymology: marra “now, today” + marda “belly”

cf. literal reading: manhimardapurlnu “I will wash your (sg) belly”

vs metaphorical reading: damngimardathin “I’m worried”

Song texts may be short but they are

often tricky (Barwick 2006: 57).

Some referencesBarwick, L. 2006. A musicologist’s wishlist: some issues, practices and practicalities in musical aspects of language documentation. Language documentation and description, 3 (2005), 53-62.

Barwick, Linda in press Keepsakes and Surrogates: Hijacking Music Technology at Wadeye (Northwest Australia). In Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media, edited by Thomas Hilder, Shzr Ee Tan and Henry Stobart. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press.

Barwick, L, Blythe, J, Marett, A & Walsh, M 2007 'Arriving, digging, performing, returning: an exercise in rich interpretation of a djanba song text in the sound archive of the Wadeye Knowledge Centre, Northern Territory of Australia', in R. M. Moyle (ed.), Oceanic Encounters: Festschrift for Mervyn McLean, Research in Anthropology and Linguistics Monographs, Auckland. 13-24.

Bowern, Claire 2003 Bardi songs and song poetry. http://www.academia.edu/963331/Bardi_songs_and_song_poetry, accessed 22 October 2013.

Walsh, Michael 2007 Australian Aboriginal song language – so many questions, so little to work with. Australian Aboriginal Studies (Special Issue edited by Allan Marett and Linda Barwick). 2007/2: 128-144.

Walsh, Michael 2010 A polytropical approach to the ‘floating pelican’ song: an exercise in rich interpretation of a Murriny Patha (northern Australia) song. In The Language of Song: A Special Issue of Australian Journal of Linguistics. Edited by Tonya Stebbins, Myfany Turpin and Stephen Morey. 30(1): 117-130

http://www.academia.edu/963331/Bardi_songs_and_song_poetry

the birds and the bees: issues in translating an aboriginal song text from north-west australia...

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