Stories from the heartwood

Otago Daily Times

a day ago

A new collection of short writing doubles down on language, Tom McKinlay writes.
A well known whakataukī (proverb) could very well stand as the guiding principal for a new collection of writing.
The whakataukī "Ruia taitea kia tū ko taikākā anake" can be understood as "only the strong survive", but more literally translates as "Strip off the sapwood so the heartwood remains".
Ruia (strip away), taitea (sapwood), tū (remain), taikākā (heartwood), anake (only).
All 100 of the contributors to Short Poto achieved just that, meeting the book's requirement to come in at under 300 words — not a splinter more.
And appropriately enough, the whakataukī also gets an outing in one of the book's entries, Jessica Hinerangi's small story Horse girls . At least it does in the te reo Māori translation ( Kōhine hōiho ).
Because each of the contributions here appears twice — on facing pages. On the left in English, on the right in te reo Māori.
The whakataukī is not used in full in Horse girls/Kōhine hōiho , rather the translator has adapted it to Hinerangi's narrative.
The line in Horse girls , as written by Hinerangi, is "... to exist as a myth and shed all sides of the self?".
The protagonist in Hinerangi's story becomes one with the horse she is riding, "a wisp of racing smoke", shedding all that is extraneous to that purpose.
So, the translation for Kōhine hōiho is "kua ruia katoatia ngā taitea o te tinana".
Ruia katoatia (shed completely), ngā taitea (sapwood), o te tinana (of the body).
It's a translation, but more than that, it shifts the action of Hinerangi's story into te ao Māori.
That's the job of the translator, says Assoc Prof Hone Morris — who oversaw the work of translating the stories in Short Poto , including Horse girls — not just to translate the English into gramatically correct te reo Māori, but to express the thought in an authentically reo Māori way.
"There's an English mind and a Māori mind," Prof Morris says. "And some translations, they might be Māori words, but the thinking behind it is English."
This then was the considerable challenge Prof Morris and his 10-strong team of translators faced in Short Poto (subtitle "The big book of small stories: Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero"), the new collection edited by Dunedin-based Michelle Elvy and Kiri Piahana-Wong (Ngāti Ranginui). Each translation needed to be not only faithful to the collection's enormous variety of styles and voices but also render the myriad imagery in a Māori way.
The book is a celebration of spare, condensed focus, across its mix of flash fiction, prose poetry and creative non-fiction but also very deliberately designed as a resource for learners of te reo Māori — so they can read the English and see how the same idea might be expressed in te reo.
Elvy says she started thinking about developing such a resource some years ago.
"I started thinking that the small form, a story on a page, it's the perfect model for learning a language," she says.
The idea was informed by her own experiences in multilingualism, as someone who has lived in countries with various mother tongues, learning them as she went.
Resident now in Aotearoa since 2008, Elvy has long championed micro and flash fiction, editing the literary journal Flash Frontier and organising the country's National Flash Fiction Day — and saw the opportunity the form offered as an educational tool.
"You know, you go back to those school years that we all had where you learn French or German or Spanish, and you might read the text side by side at some point, because you start to see how phrases form, how language is not a word-for-word translation, but it's about the rhythm and the way an idea is captured, certainly in something poetic," she says.
"So, I started to think, gosh, we should have something like this in New Zealand. It would be fantastic. Because, also, so many more people that I knew all around me, including myself, were starting to learn this language, because we realised it's something we need to do."
Hinerangi's piece, that reads like a memoir, started life in a collection of her poetry. Other pieces among the 100 range from satire and political commentary to slithers and slices of the everyday, from humorous to sobering.
Robert Sullivan teaches a lesson in New Zealand's colonial history in fewer than 200 words, in his prose poem Pupurangi Shelley (it references Ozymadias ).
Pūpū rangi are kauri snails, and Sullivan's snail journeys to the battleground New World (Ao Hou) supermarkets of Pukehinahina, Ruapekapeka and Ōhaeawai "teaching our kids about their history" (hei whakaako i ā tātou tamariki i tō rātou hītori).
Pupurangi Shelley is from Sullivan's Ockham-nominated collection Hopurangi — Songcatcher .
The translation leans into Sullivan's telling by rendering "wind" as "Tāwhirimātea".
"I miss most my kauri trees with their big trunks that sing with the wind ..." becomes "Ko te mea e tino aroha ana ahau ko ōku rākau kauri me ngā tīwai kaitā e toiere ana me Tāwhirimātea".
"I think that goes with the whole essence of the spirit of the story," Prof Morris says. "By using that personified form of natural energy."
Elvy's own piece of short writing in the collection is Tussock/Hinarepe , in which a mother and child visit Central's stark landscape.
Her line "She looks across the land" becomes "Ka kai ōna mata ki te whenua", literally, her eyes (mata) eat (kai) the land (whenua).
You'll find that saying a lot in mōteatea, Prof Morris says, the ancient songs, many of which were collected by Apirana Ngata.
"You'll find that, e kai ō mata, e kai ō mata, feast your eyes there."
The translation team will also have reached for the traditional language of whaikōrero (oratory) and karanga (calls of welcome) to find the appropriate phrases, he says.
For Elvy, beyond the pleasure of publishing a book in the two languages, it has been the excitement of seeing the ways in which these short forms are evolving and finding favour.
In 2018 she edited a collection of flash fiction and its sister forms called Bonsai , with Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe, and has been thinking about how this new collection compares, what's changed in terms of the subject matter and how it represents who we are.
"I think you have a really diverse set of stories with this book, and I think it holds up as an incredible representation of the small form."
Among the things Elvy likes is the blurring between the various forms the writers are using.
"That's the other thing about flash fiction that I really love, that line between poetry and short fiction is very fine, and sometimes hard to define. Sometimes we can't define it."
David Eggleton, whose evocative Perfume/Whakakakara also appears in Short Poto , is a good example of that, she says.
Elvy is working across these languages in other ways. Her journal Flash Frontier takes a theme for each issue, and for July it will be "Stars / Ngā Whetū" — a special winter edition, with works in English and te reo Māori.
"We really want to use the small form to keep sharing this idea that the language can be learned, it can be accessible," she says.
Elvy is also pleased with the timing of the book's appearance in Aotearoa New Zealand, when here as elsewhere culture is under attack and te reo Māori has become a target.
"I think a book like this has importance in terms of not just the beauty of literature and language but making a statement," she says.
"I had this idea three years ago and it was a completely different set of ideas that drove me at first. But now that it's out, the timing of it could not be more right." The book
• Short | Poto: The big book of small stories | Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero , edited by Michelle Elvy and Kiri Piahana-Wong, published by Massey University Press, is out on Thursday. Pupurangi Shelley Robert Sullivan
I am a kauri snail kaitiaki, look on my green spiral shell, ye mighty, and despair. I admit I've eaten noke or native worm sushi but I am a hundred millimetres long and move at 0.013 m/s through the Whirinaki, the Tai Tokerau, Waitākere and Kaimai ranges to reside outside New World Gate Pā, Pak'nSave Ruapekapeka and the Ōhaeawai Four Square, teaching our kids their history at
2 a.m., or thereabouts, distributing udon noodles from the dumpsters so our kids can save the noke. I miss most my kauri trees with their big trunks that sing with the wind and admit they stretch taller than my tall tentacles. I tell the tamariki our whānau whakapapa goes for 200 million years beyond the Treaty of Waitangi and James Busby picked up our tūpuna in a tentacular blink twice giving us his surname, Paryphanta Busbyi Busbyi, making it all about him. Aroha mai, sorry, I must eat and run. Pūpū rangi Shelley Nā Robert Sullivan
He pūpū rangi, he kaitiaki ahau, titiro mai ki taku anganga kākāriki e tōrino nei, e mārohirohi mā, me tō aurere. Āe, kua kaingia e au te noke, me kī, te sushi noke māori, heoi, kotahi rau mitamano taku roa, e 0.013 mitamano/hēkona te tere o te kōneke i ngā pae maunga o Whirinaki, o Te Tai Tokerau, o Waitākere o Kaimai hoki kia noho ki waho o Ao Hou i Pukehinahina, o Pak'nSave i Ruapekapeka, me te Four Square i Ōhaeawai, hei whakaako i ā tātou tamariki i tō rātou hītori i te 2 karaka, i taua takiwā pea, kia tuari atu i ngā kihu parāoa udon mai i ngā ipupara nui kia ora ai i ā tātou tamariki te noke. Ko te mea e tino aroha ana ahau ko ōku rākau kauri me ngā tīwai kaitā e toiere ana me Tāwhirimātea, āe, ko tōna tāroaroa ka toro ake i ōku ake kawekawe roroa. Ka kī atu au ki ngā tamariki nō ngā 200 miriona tau i tua atu o Te Tiriti o Waitangi tō mātou nei whakapapa, ā, nā Te Pūhipi ō mātou tūpuna i rarau atu i tētahi kimo kawekawe rā me te tapa mai ki tōna ake ingoa whānau, ko Paryphanta Busbyi Busbyi, hei whakamana i a ia anō. Aroha mai, me kai au, me kōneke atu.
Short | Poto: The big book of small stories | Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero , edited by Michelle Elvy and Kiri Piahana-Wong, Massey University Press.
Pupurangi Shelley was previously published in Hopurangi — Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka (AUP, 2024).