Mediation, Then and Now: Ang Tharkay’s Sherpa and Memoires d’un Sherpa

Abstract

The memoir of Ang Tharkay, a well-known Sherpa mountaineering guide and leader from the early years of Himalayan mountaineering, poses several problems for contemporary readers. The book, Memoires d’un Sherpa (A Sherpa’s Memoir), fell into obscurity after its publication in 1954, but was translated from French and reissued as Sherpa in 2016. Since the original text was heavily mediated by its editor, translator, and transcriber, can we read Sherpa as Ang Tharkay’s life story? I propose that we must, and that we can if we do this sensitively, with an eye for the types of mediation found in each edition and whose needs they serve. Therefore, we need to think about what mediation is, whose interests its serves, and how it works in the making and reading of Sherpa. Mediation in memoir discourse affects any account, past and present. Knowing how mediation works in Ang Tharkay’s memoir is essential to hearing what climbers from Nepal had to say in the 1950s, and how it is possible, and imperative, to hear their voices now, in all their complexity, in order to challenge romantic ideas about Sherpas which persist in mountaineering writing. In so doing, we can connect the stories of early Sherpa climbers about labor issues to the concerns Sherpa climbers write about today.