Robert Bringhurst

Robert Bringhurst
Born	October 16, 1946 (1946-10-16) Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Residence	Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Occupation	poet, typographer, author
Spouse	Jan Zwicky

Robert Bringhurst (born October 16, 1946) is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He is the author of The Elements of Typographic Style – a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type. He has also translated works of epic poetry from Haida mythology into English.

He lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, British Columbia (approximately 170 km northwest of Vancouver) with his wife Jan Zwicky, a poet and philosopher.

Life

Born in Los Angeles, California, he was raised in Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Alberta, and British Columbia. Bringhurst studied architecture, linguistics, and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and comparative literature and philosophy at the University of Utah. He holds a BA from Indiana University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.

Bringhurst has taught literature, art history and history of typography at several universities and held fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Career

All facets of Bringhurst’s work have been widely acclaimed. His 1992 publication, The Elements of Typographic Style has been called “the finest book ever written about typography” by type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. A collection of his poetry, The Beauty of the Weapons was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award in 1982, and A Story as Sharp as a Knife, his work on Haida symbolism, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2000.

Bringhurst, a talented linguist, has translated works from classical Greek, Arabic, Navajo, and most significantly, Haida. His interest in Haida culture stemmed from his friendship and close association with the influential Haida artist Bill Reid, with whom he wrote The Raven Steals the Light in 1984, among their other collaborations. It was this friendship that in 1987 “started Bringhurst on the philanthropic endeavour of recording the Haida canon”. The result of this labour was an almost universally lauded trilogy of works collectively titled Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers.

What controversy Bringhurst’s writing has garnered is focused on his work in Haida. The CBC radio program Ideas aired a two part series called “Land to Stand On” in 2001. These programs featured “a string of Haida claiming in the series' first episode that Bringhurst's work is ‘about keeping us in our place,’ written ‘without asking us,’ replete with ‘serious errors twisting it into the poetry that he wants,’”. These three avenues of attack have gained little if any traction in published discourse. Rather the opposite, Bringhurst has been defended and praised in print media. Not least among these voices is Margaret Atwood, who believes that “territorial squabbling cannot obscure the fact that Bringhurst’s achievement is gigantic as well as heroic”, and that far from appropriating native voices, Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers “restores to life two exceptional poets we ought to know”.

His translations of the Haida legacy have raised controversy; while his translations have reinvigorated Haida culture and the language, which in 1991 was considered "likely to be lost unless strong efforts are made very quickly to perpetuate them". Bringhurst has been accused of academic exploitation and cultural appropriation.

In 2005, Bringhurst won the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence which recognizes British Columbia writers who have contributed to the development of literary excellence in the Province.

Bibliography

Poetry

• The Shipwright's Log – 1972
• Cadastre – 1973
• Eight Objects – 1975
• Bergschrund – 1975
• Tzuhalem's Mountain – 1982
• The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–82 – 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award), 1985 (Copper Canyon Press)
• Tending the Fire – 1985
• The Blue Roofs of Japan – 1986 (Barbarian Press)
• Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music – 1986, 1987 (Copper Canyon Press)
• Conversations with a Toad – 1987
• The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–1995 – 1995
• Elements (with drawings by Ulf Nilsen) – 1995
• The Book of Silences – 2001
• Ursa Major – 2003 (shortlisted for the 2004 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize)
• New World Suite Number Three: A poem in four movements for three voices – 2006
• Selected Poems – 2009

Prose

• Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada (with Geoffrey James, Russel Keziere & Doris Shadbolt) – 1983
• Ocean/Paper/Stone – 1984
• The Raven Steals the Light (with Bill Reid) – 1984
• Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters – 1986
• The Black Canoe (with photographs by Ulli Steltzer) – 1991
• Boats Is Saintlier than Captains: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Morality, Language, and Design – 1997
• Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities – 1998
• A Short History of the Printed Word (with Warren Chappell) – 1999
• The Elements of Typographic Style – 1992, revised 1996, 2004, 2005 and 2008
• The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning – 2004
• The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Lectures 2006
• Everywhere Being is Dancing 2007
• The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada – 2008

Translation

• A trilogy entitled Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers:
  • A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World – 1999 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
  • Nine Visits to the Mythworld – (a reinterpretation of the stories of mythteller Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas, as collected in 1900 by John Reed Swanton) – 2000 (shortlisted for the 2001 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • Being in Being: The Collected Works of a Master Haida Mythteller - Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay – 2002
• Parmenides, The Fragments – 2003

External links

• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
• Robert Bringhurst reads from Nine Visits to the Mythworld (video)