Book Review

te pāhikahikatanga / incommensurabilty
by Vaughan Rapatahana (Flying Islands, 2023. NZ$10)

Reviewed by John Gallas

(Please note: this reviewer, though from Aotearoa, is not a Te Reo/Māori speaker/reader. There will be more English, and quotations of VR’s English versions of his poems, than there should be).
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Whatever happened to untamed, un-Agent-filtered, un-English-language-obliged literature? It’s here. Little book, great leap-in-the-right-direction.

Splendidly, it starts with a quadruple battery against the tyranny of English and pleas for a Te Reo/Māori readership: an introductory poem (‘Stay alive/I give you a book in Te Reo/Māori/open your eyes/open your ears …’); a Lachmann quotation (‘There is no direct substitution of one language for another … different languages express a different way of seeing the world’); an Introduction (‘I now write in my first language … because I want to fully express everything in my mind, my heart, in my soul … The English language is crammed full of the subject matter and cultural customs of the lands of Britain …’); and an in-your-face first poem (‘Fuck/I can’t exist in this language any more/it defeats me … give me an escape from this prison of English’).

What follows is 120 pages of Te Reo poems, with accompanying ‘versions’ in English. ‘I have translated these poems into the English language, but not in a ‘perfect’ translation. It’s impossible! Thus the title of Incommensurability /te pāhikahikatanga’, the author explains.

Readers who know and have followed Vaughan Rapatahana’s poetry, through, for example, ‘ternion’, ‘ngā whakamatuatanga/interludes’, and ‘ināianei/now’, will recognise much of the contents – love poems (‘ki te tūāraki’, ‘he ruri ngāwari’, ‘he papakupu o aroha’ ‘kua tekau ngā tau tonu’), poems of mourning for a lost son and broken families (‘kāore he mātāmua’, ‘ko taku whanāu’, ‘te ngākau pōuri o te huaketo’), poems of belonging (VR lives variously in Aotearoa, Hong Kong SAR and the Philippines) (‘āe te henga’, ‘te taiao Aotearoa’, ‘ko aotearoa’, ‘Orongomai’, ko taku whare tēnei’), what might be called ‘nature’ poems, with their enviromental edge (‘ngā wāna’, ‘ngā rākau’, ‘he mōtaetea: huringa āhuarangi’) …
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Book Review

He Tama Atuakore
Nā Eru Hiko-Tahuri (NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists, 43pp, $10)

Nā Alison McCulloch te arotakenga
Te kanohi hōmiromiro: Ko Arihia McClutchie

I ngā tau tata nei, i pātai au ki tētahi hoa reo Māori he aha te kupu mō te tangata kāore tōna hāhi, kāore hoki ōna whakapono ki tētahi atua. “Karekau he kupu,” tāna i whakatau ai. Me te tika o tōna whakatau. I wherawhera mai ai ngā papakupu — ko te Wiremu, ko Te Aka — ā, kāore tētahi kupu i kitea. Ka ketuketua ki rō Kūkara, ā, nāwai, nāwai ka rokohanga te ingoa o Eru Hiko-Tahuri me tana pukapuka, “Māori Boy Atheist”. I te reo Pākehā te kōrero i runga i tāna rangitaki o mua, ā, ka kaihorotia āna kupu e au. I hīkaka katoa tōku ngākau ki te kite i tētahi tangata Māori pērā i a ia.

He Pākehā au, he tauhou ki te ao Māori, me te tipu haere o te māramatanga mō te ao nei, i a au e ako ana i tēnei reo, te reo rangatira. Nā wai, nā wai, ka totoko ake i a au ngā pātai maha ki te iwi Māori mō ngā whakapono nā mātou, nā te iwi Pākehā i mau mai ki tēnei whenua.

Ki tōku nei titiro, he wāhi anō tō te whakapono Karaitiana ki te tāmitanga ā te Pākehā. Mehemea ia ka kuhu au ki tētahi whaitua Māori, pēnei i te wānanga reo, kaupapa Māori rānei, me pēhea atu hoki tēnei rāwaho e whakapuaki i tōku atuakoretanga i roto i te ngākau whakaiti me te whakaute. Āpiti atu hoki, i ngā wā e rongo ai au ki ētahi o ōku hoa ākonga Pākehā, he Karaitiana rātou, e whakaputa ana i ō rātou whakapono hāhi ki te wānanga, ki te karaehe reo Māori rānei, ka pātai au ki a au anō, me aha te tangata atuakore Pākehā? Me kōrero, me mū rānei? Kāore tonu au i te mōhio.

I te mutunga o tērā tau, nā te New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists i whakaputa i te pukapuka nei ki te reo Māori, te Ingarihi me te Wīwī hoki. Nā konā au i ako i te kupu tika mō te tangata pēnei i a au, arā, ko te “atuakore”. Koia! (Kāore anō a Te Aka kia whao te kupu ki tōna kete, engari i a au e pānui ana i te pakiwaitara ‘Puripāha: Te Pane Kaewa’ nā Witi Ihimaera, ka kitea te kupu ‘whakaponokore’. Koinei te kupu mō ‘Infidel’ i whakamāorihia e Ruth Smith. Ki a au nei, he kupu pai hoki tēnei mō te ‘non-believer’.)

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Book News / Poetry

te pahikahikatanga / incommensurabilty
by Vaughan Rapatahana (Flying Islands, 2023. NZ$10)

 

 

 

 

This is a collection of Rapatahana’s poetry across several years, written in te reo Māori (with English language translations). He believes this is a unique work of contemporary Māori language poetry, as well as emphasising throughout that the two languages are essentially incompatible and never fully translatable one into the other. For more info, click here.

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Sea Skins
by Sophia Wilson (Flying Islands, 2023. NZ$10)

Sophia Wilson’s Sea Skins explores the porous interfaces between personal, communal and environmental integrity. Slipping, sliding, going under and going overboard coexist with a determination to negotiate safe passage. Through the lenses of heritage, migration and ecological emergency, the collection shapeshifts and evolves to examine what is both cherished and damaged. ‘Sea skins’ are life’s fleeting flotsam and jetsam, teeth, tongue and bone amid dehumanising systems and alienating machines. They are word skins and survival skins, the diverse skins of sustainability and diplomacy, and ultimately, the tender under-skins at the heart of things. For more info, click here.

Wilson sifts through our scars and crimes with intricate control and a fine-gauge eye, urgency and activism always pressing on her tongue…Sea Skins palpates the threshold of crisis, from our ‘bleeding inner coastlines’ to our ‘mass extinctions,’ exposing ‘the real, bleak, airless deal[s] going down’ in lines that glimmer, strike and linger.
— Tracey Slaughter

Book Review

Gaylene’s Take: Her Life in New Zealand Film
by Gaylene Preston (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 354pp, $40)

Reviewed by Lindsay Shelton

Gaylene Preston is one of our most distinguished filmmakers, but her wonderful memoir covers far more than her movies — it is a warmly evocative account of past times and places and people and attitudes and obstacles. Every page is fascinating — and sometimes even shocking (in a good way) when you discover Gaylene’s very different experience of familiar events. She writes of “the footprints on either side, and behind and ahead — less clear, fading.” She brings so many footprints back to clear and vivid life.

Starting with her mother, who was the one who always coped. “She is very strong in me. I have to fight her off constantly but she travels with me always.” And her mother’s mother. And so many relatives on her father’s side: “The Prestons are a big Catholic brood.”

Her stories of growing up in Greymouth are memorably strange and credible. There was endless housework. “They were either peeling the spuds and getting a meal together or cleaning up after one.” Monday was wash day, with the sheets boiled in the copper and hoisted up on to the long line to dry. Tuesday was ironing day. “I liked to watch the ironing. I liked the way my mother could take a sunbeam skirt and make the pleats concertina. But the ironing was endless.” And Gaylene’s generation was “going to be educated out of hearth and home where my foremothers had ruled for centuries.”

From her position under neighbours’ kitchen tables, the small Gaylene tried to fathom what the mothers were talking about. “I spent a lot of time under the kitchen table, drawing among the legs.”  She was constantly sent outside because “‘her ears were flapping’… Indeed they were. I was constantly looking for clues. I needed to know why my mother was so unhappy and my father wasn’t”. Which was the start of her life’s work: “I’ve spent my adult life thinking about stories and their power.”

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Book Review

Wellington Architecture: A Walking Guide
by John Walsh; Photography by Patrick Reynolds (Massey University Press, 2022, $30)

Reviewed by Lindsay Shelton

This modest book should be in every Wellington home, and should be a basic gift for every visitor to the capital.

Within its 270 pages it provides authoritative and often surprising information on the buildings of a city which its author sees fondly “as compact and confined as a medieval city state.”

John Walsh knows his subject. He was born and grew up here. And he is happy to say that many of the buildings from his childhood are still here “even if they’re not all serving their original purpose.”

He not only provides precise and persuasive descriptions, but also tells the history of design and construction and architects. He admirably identifies some of the city’s best and biggest buildings such as the Wellington Railway Station – “a landmark civic feature for more than eighty years … combining a Classically ordered exterior with an ornate interior.”

And for those of us who might take it for granted, Walsh writes: “Through the entrance is one of Wellington’s finest interior spaces – the station booking hall, with its terrazzo floor inlaid with a compass design, granite and marble walls decorated in mottled dados, and a vaulted ceiling. The concourse with its concrete arches and glazed roof was designed to have the ambience of a vast sunroom.”

Then there’s the former AMP Building on Customhouse Quay which is, he writes, “the most impressive office building in what the city council calls its BNZ/Head Office Heritage Area.” Walsh makes special mention of its “marble-encased, barrel-vault main entry,” adding that the 1928 building “would look right at home on Macquarie Street in Sydney’s CBD.”

 And he notes that the nearby extraordinarily ornate Bank of New Zealand building is “still impressive after a century and a quarter of alterations.”

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