#2: A Lost Translation in Meaningfulness
Meaningfulness is lost amongst the first stories because the process of collecting and translating stories becomes disconnected from the story. This is problematic because the first story then loses it’s sense of immediacy and connection to readers. As a result, the purpose of the story may be lost throughout the many processes of publishing, which seriously impacts the meaningfulness of the content.
Another obstacle that affected the meaningfulness of the first stories was the major time gap that occurred between 1880 and 1951. Because the Indian Act outlawed the right to tell and retell stories, the possibility of storytelling was extremely limited and rare. Due to the huge time gap that is nearly a century, we should acknowledge that generations of families could have gone by. It is highly possible that memory of the first stories have been lost because they have not been told and retold throughout the 75 years. As a result, generation after generation, the first stories may have been changed or shifted due to a lack of memory, which again affects the overall meaningfulness of the content. Further, the credibility of the stories is certainly questionable after all these years of prohibited storytelling.
From Wickwire’s introduction, a third reason why our abilities to make meaning is disrupted is because of a lack of “detail, dialogue, and color”. Wickwire also mentions that it is less interesting reading about a story that sounded so interesting when it is told orally by Henry but sounded so ‘lifeless’ written in paper. Speaking from personal experience, I must agree with Wickwire on this point because the different tones in a person’s voice is so much more vibrant and enjoyable to hear in contrast to reading a lengthy paper about the same content. Furthermore, Wickwire mentioned that the original content had been translated into Latin and removed from the main text and transferred into footnotes instead. This removes meaningfulness because when the original text is removed and transferred into a footnote instead, I would assume that piece of text is less important and quite frankly even gloss over the content without reading it. With that being said, reading a story, I wouldn’t even know what to consider as important or try to seek meaning in a particular passage if the main text has been transferred to a footnote.
References:
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. 2005. Web. <http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action?docID=10225654>.