ABSTRACT
If the act and the process of reading roughly translate into a system of meaning-making, then the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead offers us an interesting view into the origin and nature of ‘meaning’ itself. The novel traces some five hundred years from the history of a Native American tribe through the attempts of two of its female protagonists’ at translating the eponymous Almanac which they have inherited from their forefathers. In this paper, I shall point out how ‘reading’ in Silko’s novel operates on multiple planes across the divides of time, space, medium and language. Efforts will be made to highlight the problems and prospects of such a reading that attempts to reconstruct history out of what might have been extremely personal posts of bygone times, forgotten memories, and distorted impressions. I shall also show how this very act of reading in Silko’s novel both helps and hinders the translators’ negotiations with their ‘selves’ and the ‘world’.
