In Fond Remembrance of Me

Howard A. Norman

Macmillan, 2005 - Biography & Autobiography - 166 pages

Howard Norman spent the fall of 1977 in Churchill, Manitoba, translating into English two dozen "Noah stories" told to him by an Inuit elder. The folktales reveal what happened when the biblical Noah sailed his Ark into Hudson Bay in search of woolly mammoths and lost his way. By turns startling, tragic, and comical, these inimitable narratives tell the history of the Arctic and capture the collision of cultures precipitated by the arrival of a hapless stranger in a strange land.
Norman himself was then a stranger in a strange land, but he was not alone. In Churchill he encountered Helen Tanizaki, an Anglo-Japanese woman embarked on a similar project--to translate the tales into Japanese. An extraordinary linguist and an exact and compelling friend, Tanizaki became Norman's guide through the characters, stories, and customs he was coming to know, and a remarkable intimacy sprang up between them--all the more intense because it was to be fleeting; Tanizaki was fatally ill.
Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Norman recaptures with vivid immediacy a brief but life-shifting encounter and the earthy, robust stories that occasioned it.

Contents

• INTRODUCTION: 3
• Part I WOMAN TYPING ARCTIC: 11
• Part II A HELEN MISCELLANY: 75
• Part III TO BECOME A BIRD OF THE SEA AND CLIFFS: 121
• Part IV THE AFTERLIFE: 141
• EPILOGUE THE KIMONO: 161

About the author

Howard Norman was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1949 and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He attended Western Michigan University, the Folklore Institute of Indiana University, and the University of Michigan. His work with the Cree Indians created an interest and he then got a job as a translator of Native American poems and folktales. He put together a collection of his translations in the book, The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems of the Swampy Cree Indians, which was named the co-winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by the Academy of American Poets. With the Help of a Whiting Award, he has also written The Northern Lights as well as Kiss in the Hotel, Joseph Conrad and Other Stories, and The Bird Artist, which was named one of Time Magazine's Best Five Books of 1994 and won the New England Booksellers Association Prize in Fiction.

Bibliographic information

• Title: In Fond Remembrance of Me
• Author: Howard A. Norman
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2005
• ISBN: 0865476802, 9780865476806
• Length: 166 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures; Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; History / Canada / General; Social Science / Folklore & Mythology