Krisztina Kodó: A Modernist Perspective of Cultural Translation in Carroll Aikins' play, The God of Gods

Article

The article aims at examining and discussing Carroll Aikins' play The God of Gods (1919), which was the only one of Aikins' plays to be produced. The work is an allegorical tale of "the North American Indian" (Wright xi), in which two lovers, Suiva and Yellow Snake, are sacrificed for purposes that go beyond Native cultural boundaries and open up to incorporate greater themes, as materialism, greed, theosophy, religion, modernist theatrical experiments and Nietzschean intertexts. As an example of cultural translation the play crosses cultural borders and appropriates another culture, hence native culture. However, in God of Gods Aikins' aim, seemingly, is not to translate another culture, that of the Okanagan First Nations, but to take advantage and use it as a cloak through which he can illustrate universal concepts and evoke sensations through shape and colour, especially with a focus on negative perspectives, relating to the human being, particularly that of the white man.