Panel: The Great Beyonds
Copanelists: Clare Brant and Micha Gerritt Philipp Edlich
The movement of mountain experiences into text is centuries old. The first translators were the eighteenth- century French and English philosophers and poets, who found not just terror and oppression in the Alps, but a synergy that brought to the perceiving subject a range of sensations not yet qualified by aesthetics, philosophy, or religion. Brought into textual and visual discourses, both high and low, these phenomena became sought after and marketable. By the mid-nineteenth century, mountaineers were profiting from translation, and every generation since has been engaged in creating virtual experiences for non-climbers.
While the current Alpine stylists of the Himalayas, like their forbears, write narratives thick with travel writing, natural history, ethnography, adventure writing, and confession, in this paper, I focus upon one rhetorical strategy: the translation of experience couched in the terms of the natural sublime. In turning to the sublime to translate cutting edge climbs done in a traditional way, Alpine style writers maintain a connection with mountaineering’s genesis and abide by a foundational transaction of mountaineering literature: suspense followed by an appreciated relief, as the mountaineer life writers document the approach, then doubts, engagement with danger, success through extreme effort, and finally the return, exhausted but transformed. And yet, while the sublime provides the occasion for producing an account, and often provides justifications within the account for choosing to take deadly risks, only the survivors profit.
Tino Ramirez was born in Japan in 1955 and grew up on O‘ahu, where he began surfing more than forty years ago. A reader of mountaineering literature, he has never been above 10,000 feet, or seen snow fall. He has worked as a writer for Honolulu’s two daily newspapers, and is currently assistant to the director at Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and for the second time, an MA candidate in Mānoa’s English department.