Folk Communities in Translation: Salvage Primitivism and Edward Sapir’s French-Canadian Folk Songs

Today, Edward Sapir (1884-1939) is best remembered for his contributions to Boasian cultural anthropology and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. What is less well-known is that he also wrote and published poetry, a passion that he shared with fellow students of Boas such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. His poetic output is distinguished, however, by experiments in a wide variety of forms: from sonnets to brief quasi-imagist vignettes, from children’s poems to translations of folk songs. In this chapter, we focus on four of his renditions of popular French-Canadian folk songs, which were published in the July 1920 issue of Poetry. After being awarded with an honorable mention from the magazine, he published three more folk songs in Queen's Quarterly (1922) and co-authored, with Marius Barbeau, the anthology Folk Songs of French Canada (Yale UP, 1925). Sapir's interest in the cultural practices of folk communities--practices that are also popular in a second sense of the term (produced by the people for the people)--links up with his studies of Native American languages, both of which are driven by a desire to preserve for posterity cultures perceived as giving way to the pressures of modernization, and a broader search for authenticity that energized the modernist movement and prompted Poetry magazine to devote its February 1917 issue to ‘aboriginal poetry’, that is, interpretations of Native American songs by Anglo-American writers. Sapir's "Note on French-Canadian Folk-songs" thus emphasizes that "the great currents of modern civilization have, until recent days, left practically unaffected this colony of old France [Quebec], where the folk still observe customs, use implements, recite tales, and sing songs that take us right back to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries." In Sapir's versatile hands, salvage anthropology and literary primitivism go hand in hand. This chapter analyzes Sapir's versions of French-Canadian folk-songs from the transnational perspective that has reshaped American Studies since the 1990s. In crossing linguistic, national, generic, and medial boundaries, these poems bring into contact a variety of communal sites and practices, including early modern European songs, the popular realm of twentieth-century French-Canadian folk culture, and the literary community of the editors, contributors, and readers of the little magazines where modernism happened. Our chapter inquires into the epistemological and political ramifications of the various translations that take place as sounds are converted into texts and one language into another.

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