Novel to be translated into Cherokee

A section of Charles Frazier's new book is being translated into Cherokee, with the intention of publishing it separately as the first novel ever in that language.

Frazier hopes the project, for which he'll write a foreword, will pave the way for children's books and other literature that could be used to help keep the language alive. Any profits from sales of the book would go into further translations, he said.

Immersion programs are teaching the language to children, but there is little written in Cherokee. Fears are it could disappear in 20 to 30 years. A few hundred adults are fluent in Cherokee County, N.C., and a few thousand on the Oklahoma reservation, Frazier said.

The project entails an approximately 100-page section of the novel that is about the forced removal of the Cherokee from their lands to the West in the early 19th century.

Myrtle Driver, clerk to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee's tribal council, began translating the text this summer. Barbara Duncan, education director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, also is working on the project.

Duncan said Driver told her the humor in "Thirteen Moons" will go over well in her native tongue. "That means that Charles really got the culture right," Duncan said.

Duncan read an advance copy of the novel early this summer.

"He captured a little piece of how the Cherokee people look at the world and their relationship with each other," Duncan said. "It's hard to write that down in an anthropology text book. A novel can capture those things. In that sense, he got it very much right."

Cherokee is the only Indian language that has its own system of writing, which the leader Sequoyah invented in 1821. Frazier called it a rich language that uses far more complex verb tenses than English.

Frazier said he enjoys when Driver calls him up with questions about what he meant. For example, in one passage Frazier describes a character as "green as a barrel of June apples." There is no translation for "green" used that way, but there is a word for June apples, he said.

Driver and Duncan will be part of the program Tuesday when Frazier appears at Meredith College for a reading. Driver will read some of the translation, and Cherokee music will included. They will also accompany Frazier to readings in Washington, D.C., Kansas City and Cherokee.