184 contemporary poetry
danger and even personal transformation. As with the trickster
mythology, the deer woman is aligned with shape-shifting, and
her fi guration as a woman is betrayed by having deers’ hooves
instead of feet. The speaker’s dual vision portrays the confl ict
between contemporary and Native cultures. As the woman fi nishes
the dance, we are told she is dressed in ‘a stained red dress with
tape on her heels’ (p. 6 ). Yet during the dance she is portrayed
as a myth-maker ‘slipped down through dreamtime’, becoming
eventually a collective ideal: ‘The promise of feast we all knew
was coming. The deer who crossed through knots of a curse to
fi nd us’ (p. 6 ). Key to the poem is the diffi culty of fi nding the
words to describe the experience of the dance that the community
witnesses:
In this language there are no words for how the real world col-
lapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would
come into focus, but I couldn’t take it in this dingy envelope.
(p. 5 )Harjo skilfully presents the tensions between the spiritual and
material; the poem searches for reparation with the world as a
holistic presence. At the close, a promise of reaffi liation exists in
‘her fawn a blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left’ (p. 6 ).
We can extend Stuart Cochran’s analysis of Simon Ortiz’s poetry
to Joy Harjo’s poem. Cochran proposes that Ortiz’s ethnopoetics
‘speak of identities inseparable from particular landscapes and of
the spiritually and culturally disintegrative impact of the loss of
that connection’.^38 Through this perspective, we can concur that
Harjo and Ortiz also affi rm ‘the primacy of storytelling and the
signifi cance that stories give to the land and its people’.^39
BILINGUALISM AND TRANSLATION IN POETRY
For some poets, the relationship with an Anglophone culture
necessitates elements of translation, a process which is made
evident through the act of writing. Lawrence Venuti considers that
literary translation is often reliant upon the translator’s invisibility.