Discussions

This seems like a lot of money to pay for four manuscripts with poems on them. The story does not tell where these poems are to be kept in the future, is the new owner going to share the poems, or are they to keep them in secret for another undetermined period of time?  
Rebel leader had a literary side as well as a political side  
Last Updated: Tuesday, November 25, 2008  
CBC News  
Louis Riel's legacy as a literary figure should be preserved, alongside his political legacy, says a writer who has translated the work of the Métis leader.  
Paul Savoie, a Canadian poet and author of Crac, said he didn't know Riel was a poet until he was asked to translate his work.  
There is an argument to be made that Riel was an important literary figure as well as a politician and leader of the 1885 North-West Rebellion, Savoie said before Riel's manuscripts went on the auction block Tuesday night in Toronto.  
"The ones that are being auctioned he wrote while he was in jail and waiting to be executed and they were handed to his jailer, so they're quite interesting just for that fact," Savoie said in an interview with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.  
The manuscripts sold for $27,000, more than five times the expected price.  
Poems written in English, on pad from jailer  
The poems, written in English, were handed to his jail guard, police Const. Robert Hobbs, who had given Riel a writing pad. They were put up for auction by descendants of Hobbs.  
The poetry contains many powerful images, as well as religious references that became important to Riel as he faced his execution, Savoie said.  
"He started poetry when he was a very young man," he said.  
"He had been sent from the Manitoba settlement to Montreal to study to become a priest and while he was studying the classics, he fell in love with this form and he was already writing a lot of poetry in his teen years."  
Riel wrote most of his poetry in French, but his final poems were penned in English. (Canadian Press) Riel continued writing throughout his life, but he lived in a period when little poetry was being published in North America, and none in Manitoba.  
"Some of his poetry is very sophisticated when you consider the time," Savoie said. "Maybe 20 to 30 poems are quite striking."  
Common view of Riel 'too one-sided'  
Savoie said translating Riel's work helped him get beyond the myth of Riel as a folk hero that he had grown up with as a francophone from Manitoba.  
"It turned him into a multi-dimensional figure for me … Over the years there's been two views of him, the hero and the misunderstood mystical figure and the crazy man, and both are wrong, both are too one-sided," he said.  
"What it did for me is it humanized everything and it placed everything within the context of a certain Canadian history which is sometimes limited in way we portray it," Savoie said.  
"At some point in time in Canada there has to be realization that this is an extremely important part of our history," he said.