Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds by Elizabeth Yeoman (review)

Reviewed by: Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds by Elizabeth Yeoman Kristina Fagan Bidwell (bio) Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds by Elizabeth Yeoman University of Manitoba Press, 2022 as part of my research on Indigenous-led collaboration, I have been interviewing scholars about their collaborative work. Many have said that despite having extensive collaborative experience, they have never thought in a systematic way about how they collaborate. By contrast, Elizabeth Yeoman's Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds is a deep, extended reflection on a specific collaboration. In 2019, Innu elder Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue published a translation of her diaries, originally written in Innu-aimun, under the title, Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive. While this book has Penashue's name on the cover, it was the product of an intensive collaborative process. Yeoman and Penashue worked closely together for over a decade to translate, explain, organize, edit, and illustrate the diaries. Now, with Exactly What I Said, Yeoman describes and reflects on that process. Despite the title, this is not a work of translation studies in a traditional sense. Yeoman is, she freely admits, a beginning learner of Innu-aimun. Penashue orally translated her own writing into English, while Yeoman worked with her to transcribe the translations and then to edit them into a form that would be accessible to a wide English-reading audience. Yeoman describes her struggles to express Penashue's voice on paper, both her dialect of Innu-aimun and her eloquent form of English, giving examples of words that she struggled to translate, such as the Innu word nutshimit ("the land") where "something fundamental is missing in all of the attempts to convey its meaning in English or French" (134). However, Yeoman is less concerned with translating words with translating worlds, that is, with the challenge of making Penashue's Innu culture, forms of expression, lands, and experiences meaningful to outside readers. Yeoman asks, "How do you convey exactly what someone said across sometimes radically different languages, cultures, and histories?" (13). In response to this question, the book's chapters are organized around various modes through which worlds are transmitted—maps, stories, images, voices, signs, texts, songs, and physical experiences. Each chapter focuses on a single mode, narrating Yeoman's experiences working with Penashue [End Page 169] within that mode, reflecting on its potential and limitations, and then contextualizing their work within a wide range of scholarship, art, and activism. Rather than putting forward a centralized argument, this book is story-based, exploratory, and self-reflective. Yeoman's approach could be described in terms of what Métis literary scholar Warren Cariou has called "critical humility"—an approach to academic work that is relationship-based, personal, accessible, and humble (1–12).1 Instead of presenting herself as an authority on Innu language and culture, Yeoman emphasizes her lack of expertise and her learning process. She argues that her lack of knowledge actually became an asset in working with Penashue because it necessitated a lengthy, in-person, and open process of listening. Yeoman is critical of the ways in which federal research granting agencies work in opposition to such openness, for example, by requiring that Yeoman be the applicant rather than Penashue, that the application be in English or French, and that the project fit within the "often simplistic rules and formulas" of ethics review (163). In contrast with such institutional formulas, Yeoman's book is primarily interested in the ways in which her and Penashue's work moved outside of such boundaries: "Working together can also help us think beyond binary oppositions such as teller and recorder or oral and written as we try to understand each other" (130). In her conclusion, Yeoman reflects on how she and Penashue, through their work together, both arrived as a place of "amazement at what we experienced in worlds outside our own when we had the courage to venture into them" (210). From this personal example of transformation, she looks toward the possibility for wider human change as we face the immense challenges of climate change. Exactly What I Said is thus not just a reflection on how to collaborate...

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