An Ojibwe Daphnis and Chloe

In The Translation of Dr. Apelles, Ojibwe novelist David Treuer creates a reclusive scholar named Dr. Apelles who translates a newly discovered Native American manuscript. This manuscript turns out to be an Ojibwe version of Longus's second-century Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe. As he translates the work, Dr. Apelles falls in love with a beautiful woman named Campaspe, just as his namesake, the famous Hellenistic painter, did. Treuer's novel serves as a postmodern exemplum of his literary theory that Native literature should be judged by aesthetic rather than anthropological criteria and that all reality is a text to be “translated.”

Art · Art history · Literature · Painting · Postmodernism · Classics · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Philosophy · Publishing and Scholarly Communication

• The Politics of Make-Believe

  Colleen G Eils, Colleen G Eils Colleen G Eils•Studies in American Indian…•2014

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