Te Haumihiata Mason – The te reo translator

Friday, 7 June 2019

Te reo translator Te Haumihiata Mason sits under a row of her ancestors captured in portraits hanging along the wall of her suburban Rotorua home.

Steam rises from the thermal spring in her backyard. Fruits from the orchard she has nurtured against its will in this infertile soil lie on the kitchen bench waiting to be bottled and baked.

As a girl she lived off the land. Old habits die hard.

Mason (Ngati Tūhoe) was born in the tiny settlement of Ruatoki at the foot of Te Urewera.

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It was an isolated Māori community where only te reo Māori was spoken.

Life was pretty hard says Mason, the third of eight children.

'We lived in a shack. I can still see it in my mind's eye. It consisted of four rooms – the biggest of which was the kitchen. There was no electricity. The stove provided cooking and heating. Everyone bunked up.

'Water came from a spring and food from the land. Food was stored underground in a rua for the winter – kumara, potatoes, apples, pears.

'Yes, life was hard but we knew we were loved. We were happy.'

They lived seasonally. Foraging was a way of life.

She remembers the 'sheer joy' of going up the Whakatāne River with her mother, Hinewaho (Tūhoe), to get eels.

'Growing kai is being taught in schools now but back when I was a child it was a way of life. It was either that or starve.'

She contracted tuberculosis as a young girl and was sent to stay with her great-grandmother Pihitahi Trainor, whose image sits in that line of portraits of her whānau.

'She looked after me. I just adored her. I remember tracing my finger on her moko as I lay in bed.

'I was quite sick for a long time. I'd often wake in the early hours of the morning and hear her doing a karakia (prayer) for me.'

Moving to Whakatāne where her father had a job as a builder was a bit of a shock after their rural bliss in Ruatoki.

She was 9 and neither she nor her siblings spoke a word of English.

School life was about trying to fit in, trying not to stand out, but in their new life in town they did stand out. They didn't fit in.

'Mum used to sew our clothing with an old machine – we were not dressed like other children. We were just not in the loop. We stood out like sore thumbs. We were bullied purely because we couldn't speak their language.

'We were laughed at and mocked. We were called 'those dumb Māoris from Ruatoki'.

'We were not allowed to speak te reo at school. We had to speak English. If we were caught speaking Māori, we were strapped. The way we got around that was to say nothing.'

She developed fear as a young girl in this new and strange environment. A fear of not knowing how to speak English, a fear of getting things wrong, which stayed with her for a very long time.

'I decided it could either make life miserable for me or I could work hard and I decided to work hard.

'Life took a turn for us but we just had to keep going,' says Mason.

'That's always been my motto: Take a painkiller and keep going and don't worry about it.'

Mason's life has come, rather satisfyingly, full circle.

Where once she was beaten for speaking the forbidden language of te reo Māori, now she is paid to translate it.

A wide smile spreads across her face. 'Yes, that's exactly what it is – a full circle. Now I get paid to speak and write my language.'

With that she gives a good laugh. How times have changed, eh.

Mason, 68, has just finished Te Rātaka a Tētahi Kōhine, a translation of Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl.

The diary, to be published on Wednesday, charts the life of Anne and her family who were hidden by their non-Jewish friends in a secret annex in Amsterdam at the time of the Nazi occupation during World War II.

It was the young girl's honesty that attracted her to the job of translating it, she says.

'I loved her honesty because that was the way I grew up. Honesty was everything. Nobody hid what they were thinking. There's plenty of evidence of that in haka, in waiata. If something nasty was said about a woman in the old world, well, she just threw it right back in a waiata and I like that.

'That's the Māori way. My uncles always said, the marae ātea is the Māori stage and the drama of whatever was happening at the marae was played out there. It was all about poetry, expressing yourself, saying how you feel. You can't get any more theatrical or dramatic than that.'

'It allowed people to get stuff off their chest. It allowed for grieving. It was a healthy way to live and I miss that.'

Mason's translations have included popular music and Shakespearean plays as well as bread and butter work from the Government and the private sector.

It's not just a job, though, she says.

'I make a living being involved in te reo Māori and I love it. I live for it. It is me, it is who I am.'

Mason left school the day she turned 15. She was desperate to get out of there, she says.

She got a job delivering telegrams on a bicycle in Whakatāne.

She later moved to Rotorua to work in the Post Office before moving on to Wellington where she enrolled at the telegraph training school.

She got married and moved to Tokoroa where she continued working at the Post Office and began her family.

A mother to four sons, she lost her youngest in an accident seven years ago. His photo sits next to her bed. The ashes of her beloved dog sit in a small urn on her chest of drawers.

All this – the photos, the portraits dotted around her home – are a constant reminder of who she is, where she came from.

In her 30s, life took another significant turn. A mentor of hers, Timoti Karetu, suggested she go to university.

'I thought he was freaking crazy! All that had happened between the ages of 15 and 30-something was life but after some time, I did enrol at Waikato where I did a BA in education and te reo Māori.'

After her graduation she became a lecturer at the university's Māori department.

When Karetu became the commissioner at the Māori Language Commission, he asked her to come and work for him, which she did on and off for years.

Meantime, she became the go-to translator for te reo Māori – anything and everything, from government department to private enterprise translations.

She runs her own show these days taking the jobs that interest her.

A new stage of life is starting for Mason and it's time for a change of scene, she says.

Pretty soon she's going home to Te Urewera. She's bought land in Tāneatua, just a few kilometres from Ruatoki and is in the midst of putting a dwelling there.

She's looking forward to gardening in fertile soil. She's good at that. When she bought her Rotorua home, she turned the barren garden into a lush oasis of fruit trees and native flora and fauna.

She loves the land and it's time she got back to working it, she says.

'Everything I do, everything I am today goes back to my childhood growing up in Ruatoki.

'As a youngster I used to fish at the heads in Whakatāne for pakirikiri (spotty), parore (black bream), snapper, gurnard, rock cod, eels from the river. I taught my children how to forage and fish. I still follow the moon for a good day's fishing.

'I still run in the seasons. I live my life by the them. In September I'll pick pikopiko. Come August 15, when the whitebaiting season starts, I'll be off back to my river.'

Full circle.

Kapai.

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