Tom McKinlay reviews Short | Poto edited by Michelle Elvy and Kiri Piahana-Wong for Otago Daily Times:
A well known whakataukī (proverb) could very well stand as the guiding principal for a new collection of writing.
The whakataukī "Ruia taitea kia tū ko taikākā anake" can be understood as "only the strong survive", but more literally translates as "Strip off the sapwood so the heartwood remains".
Ruia (strip away), taitea (sapwood), tū (remain), taikākā (heartwood), anake (only).
All 100 of the contributors to Short Poto achieved just that, meeting the book’s requirement to come in at under 300 words — not a splinter more.
And appropriately enough, the whakataukī also gets an outing in one of the book’s entries, Jessica Hinerangi’s small story Horse girls. At least it does in the te reo Māori translation (Kōhine hōiho).
Because each of the contributions here appears twice — on facing pages. On the left in English, on the right in te reo Māori.
The whakataukī is not used in full in Horse girls/Kōhine hōiho, rather the translator has adapted it to Hinerangi’s narrative.
The line in Horse girls, as written by Hinerangi, is "... to exist as a myth and shed all sides of the self?".
The protagonist in Hinerangi’s story becomes one with the horse she is riding, "a wisp of racing smoke", shedding all that is extraneous to that purpose.
So, the translation for Kōhine hōiho is "kua ruia katoatia ngā taitea o te tinana".
Ruia katoatia (shed completely), ngā taitea (sapwood), o te tinana (of the body).
It’s a translation, but more than that, it shifts the action of Hinerangi’s story into te ao Māori.
That’s the job of the translator, says Assoc Prof Hone Morris — who oversaw the work of translating the stories in Short Poto, including Horse girls — not just to translate the English into gramatically correct te reo Māori, but to express the thought in an authentically reo Māori way.
"There’s an English mind and a Māori mind," Prof Morris says. "And some translations, they might be Māori words, but the thinking behind it is English."’
Read the rest of the review here.
