Mediation, Then and Now: Ang
Tharkay’s Sherpa and Memoires
d’un Sherpa
Julie Rak
University of Alberta, Department of English and Film Studies, HC 3-5, Edmonton AB T6G 2E5,
Canada
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8470-3202
jrak@ualberta.ca
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.
Keywords: autobiographical literature / mountaineering / Sherpas / Ang Tharkay / memoirs /
literary mediation
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 45.3 (2022)
In 1960, the Belgian cartoonist Hergé published TinTin in Tibet in
French (titled TinTin au Tibet). TinTin, his faithful dog Snowy, and
the irritating yet loyal Captain Haddock journey to the mountains of
Tibet to find Chang, TinTin’s friend who was in a plane crash high in
the mountains. Their guide to the crash site who aids in the search for
Chang is “Tharkey,” recommended to TinTin as “the best Sherpa in
the district” (Hergé 13). The character is based on climber, guide, and
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126
sirdar (expedition leader of Sherpa climbers and other workers) Ang
Tharkay, who became the best-known Sherpa in the French-speaking
world because of his role in helping the French national team summit
Annapurna in 1950.1 Expedition leader Maurice Herzog’s best-selling
account of the climb—originally published as Annapurna premier
8000 (Annapurna, the First 8000er)—had made Ang Tharkay famous
(Roberts 22). Ang Tharkay is part of Hergé’s comic because to European
francophones at the time, he stood in for Sherpas in mountaineering
stories and embodied their virtues in any adventure tale about moun-
taineering, much as Tenzing Norgay would do for anglophone audi-
ences interested in British climbing.2 Ang Tharkay’s presence affirms
the power and the reach of Herzog’s account of the Annapurna climb,
which was nothing less than the story of French national pride at being
the first to summit an 8000-meter peak in the wake of their humiliat-
ing defeat by Germany during World War II (see Roberts 133).
The depiction of Ang Tharkay in a popular comic is heavily medi-
ated. His image conforms to genre expectations of the TinTin series,
with its focus on adventure stories for children set in exotic places.
“Tharkey” is the epitome of the helpful Sherpa, an image borrowed
liberally from other mountaineering expedition accounts of the 1950s,
which romanticize Sherpa people as unspoiled and delighted to serve
climbers from the West without letting them speak for themselves or
represent why they took on the dangerous work of expedition support.
As Sherpa and other Nepalese climbers begin to take control of their
climbing careers in the twenty-first century and speak about their lives
in their own voices, they must contend with such older (and perva-
sive) ideas about Sherpa innocence, servility, childlikeness, and purity
that have marked so many accounts about Sherpas. The existence of
two early memoirs by the best-known Sherpa climbers of their gen-
eration, Tenzing Norgay and Ang Tharkay, therefore has the poten-
tial to correct the tendency to see Sherpa climbers of the 1950s only
1 Ang Tharkay’s name follows Sherpa naming conventions. His last name would
have been Sherpa, but it is almost never used. In the English translation of his memoir,
Ang Tharkay’s son Dawa Sherpa calls him Ang Tharkay, and so I follow that conven-
tion. Where other versions of Ang Tharkay’s name are used, I have included the vari-
ants. See Tenzing xix–xi for a complete discussion of Sherpa naming protocols and the
history of Tenzing Norgay’s names.
2 We can be sure this is Ang Tharkay in TinTin in Tibet because in a 2016 inter-
view with Ang Tharkay’s son Dawa and grandson Renaud, Renaud relates that he
found out how famous Ang Tharkay was by accident when he read a TinTin comic on
a visit to France and realized that the character was based on his grandfather. In the
same interview, Dawa confirms that it is his father in the comic (see Panday).
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through the eyes of their employers. Paying attention to these mem-
oirs “transforms the climbing Sherpa from being merely represented,
mainly by Western authors, to ownership of their own stories” and the
importance of their own, oral, ways of recounting their lives (Dhar,
“Recounting”). Tenzing’s autobiographies have begun to receive criti-
cal attention in scholarship about mountaineering literature and histo-
ry.3 It is imperative now, as Amrita Dhar says, to pay serious attention
to Ang Tharkay’s memoir, now translated into English and released as
Sherpa in 2016, because “it is important to understand [it and other]
works as crucial testaments of the intersections of colonialism, labor,
love, languages, literacy, orality, and mountaineering” (Dhar, “Travel
and Mountains” 359).
How should we pay attention? Dhar points out too that Ang
Tharkay’s memoir, like Tenzing’s, is heavily mediated. Like Tenzing,
Ang Tharkay was not print literate and so he appears to have worked
with an editorial collaborator, an interpreter who made notes as he
spoke and translated them into English, and even had a translator
who translated the collaborator Basil P. Norton’s text into French
(Dhar, “Travel and Mountains” 359). Moreover, like Man of Everest,
Memoires d’un Sherpa went out of print soon after it was published,
while the memoirs of European climbers about their roles on climb-
ing expeditions, such as Sir Edmund Hillary’s High Adventure, or
Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, are still in print. Herzog’s book has sold
more than 11 million copies, been translated into 40 languages, and
was required reading in French schools for many years (see Roberts
22). Meanwhile, for decades, Ang Tharkay’s own version of events on
Annapurna was almost unknown.
In 2016, however, Memoires d’un Sherpa was translated into
English and is now available from Mountaineers Books as Sherpa, with
accompanying annotations and paratextual material by Ang Tharkay’s
relatives. The reissue of Sherpa therefore presents an opportunity to
examine Ang Tharkay’s story as Dhar recommends we should, but it
is important too not to simply see the text as an example of an unme-
diated life story of an Indigenous person. It is vital that Indigenous
people, including Sherpas, have ownership of their own stories. At the
same time, it is important to see how mediation works in the produc-
tion of any life story, particularly these types of stories, as a way to
produce meaning rather than distort it. The voices in a memoir by an
3 Scholarly investigations of Tenzing Norgay’s memoirs include Slemon; Hansen;
Rak 163–172.
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Indigenous person should not be seen as pure and uncorrupted, which
would reinstall romantic ideas about Sherpa people as unspoiled, part
of nature rather than culture. Nor should we think about collabora-
tive texts with Indigenous people as rendering the Indigenous story
tellers as not capable of full representation. Stephen Slemon does this
in his treatment of Tenzing Norgay, where he puts the word auto-
biography into quotation marks as “autobiography” because he does
not think it should be attributed to Tenzing. In his analysis of the
different answers Tenzing gives about who summited Everest first,
Slemon writes: “[P]erhaps it is in the space between Tenzing’s two
strategic answers that a kind of subaltern human agency might be
said to have found a voice” (Slemon 38). But in that “perhaps” and
“might be said” is a denial of what it means to pay attention to what
Tenzing does say. Gayatri Spivak in her revisiting of her landmark
essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” took up this question, saying that
of course the subaltern does speak. It is a failure of communication to
assume that the subaltern does not. It is rather that “it is important to
acknowledge our complicity in the muting” of that speaking (Spivak
64). Mediation does not mean that Tenzing, or Ang Tharkay, can-
not speak in a collaborative text. If we do not understand the work
of Ang Tharkay and Tenzing Norgay as testimony, Amrita Dhar says,
“we continue to exclude some of the most vitally important voices of
mountain history” (Dhar, “Travel and Mountains” 359). We do that
when we assume that works of memoir are not intersubjective and not
collaborative. We need to pay attention to what does happen in the
work of mediation, including what possibilities it forecloses and what
possibilities it opens up for the communication of Sherpa experiences
and ways of knowing as they interact with other knowledge systems.
Therefore, we need to think about what mediation is, whose inter-
ests it 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 com-
plexity. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith says, Spivak challenges all scholars to
take Indigenous intellectual work seriously. The problem is not with
speaking, but how we listen and take seriously what we hear (see Smith
81). Listening for mediation is essential in this process.
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What is Mediation in Memoir?
In False Summit, I argue that one of the best ways to understand more
widely what climbing means is to read the memoirs and expedition
accounts of a wide variety of climbers with a view to listening to what
they say, in context. Memoirs and other life writing accounts do several
important things which are important to climbing history and culture.
They are acts of witness that other climbers use to understand how to
do a climb or what happened during one; they build (and destroy)
reputations within the public record; they bring into view the thoughts
and reflections of their subjects; and finally, they are mediated accounts
of experience between climbers and the social worlds they inhabit (see
Rak 9–11).
All memoirs, not just ones about climbing, are mediated. Like other
books, when they are published, they enter what Robert Darnton orig-
inally called the Communications Circuit, where they journey from
the pens or keyboards from authors to agents, publishers, printers,
booksellers, and ultimately, to readers (see Darnton 12). Books are not
direct transmissions of an author’s thoughts to a reader: their content is
produced between the work of many actors who alter content, distribu-
tion, and even the genre of the book. The Communications Circuit has
been adapted many ways, including for digital publishing (see Murray
and Squires 4), but the general idea remains the same: books undergo
intense processes of mediation because editors, publishers, agents, and
many other people affect the book’s content, how it is received, and
how it circulates. In addition, what Gérard Genette called paratexts,
the printed matter of a book not by the author, such as endorsements
or prefaces, affect the ways in which the text will be read. Paratexts
are a “zone not just of transition” between author and reader, “but of
transaction,” because they represent ways for a reader to understand a
book and its arguments (Genette 261–262). In addition, books them-
selves are part of power relations within what Pierre Bourdieu called
the literary field, one of the fields of cultural production marked by
its own rules of engagement between producers of meaning, cultural
capital, and circulation (see Bourdieu 311–313). Mediation is a way
to describe how communications circulate between actors in any sys-
tem, and how a medium, such as print, affects the message sent and
received. Therefore, no memoirs about climbing, whether they are by
Sherpa authors or not, are simply about experience. They appear within
expectations of genres and their discourse, and they are produced by
publishers who help to shape them. As is the case with Ang Tharkay,
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130
significant interventions are made at the levels of editorial work, trans-
lation, and transcription. Ang Tharkay’s voice appears within this web
of signification.
Memoirs as a genre also have the potential to construct the identi-
ties of their writers, making visible stories we have not seen before, and
changing the lives of the writers in the process. Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson have characterized the work of making an autobiography as “a
moving target, a set of shifting self-referential practices that, in engag-
ing the past, reflect on identity in the present” (Smith and Watson 1).
Therefore, memoirs are a matter of public record but not unreflectively
so. They need to be read sensitively because they are rhetorical. What is
more, memoirs are often read for their singularity, as if they are about
one subject’s story, but life writing scholarship for a long time has
accepted that memoirs are intersubjective. Intersubjectivity means that
life stories are about the stories of others just as much as they are about
the self, and that the subjectivity of readers and what they bring to a life
story becomes part of the reading process. Intersubjectivity therefore
involves negotiations between authors and readers “aimed at producing
a shared understanding of the meaning of a life” (16).
This way of reading for mediation in autobiography is particularly
important when the subject of a memoir has less power than the appa-
ratus that produces it. In the case of Indigenous people in particular,
there is a long history of the cultural appropriation of their stories by
non-Indigenous people within academic disciplines such as anthropol-
ogy, or within public discourse, and a long history of co-opting the life
stories of Indigenous people (along with their cultural expressions and
their land) for settler colonial purposes.4 The result can do violence to
an Indigenous author and the stories they might want to tell. In the
case of memoirs, there are many cases of non-Indigenous people collab-
orating with an Indigenous person to make a memoir, but the conven-
tions of the story and uneven power dynamics in the collaboration can
cause the meaning and intent of the story to be altered. Rather than say
that this renders the work of making a collaboration impossible, Cree
scholar of editing Greg Younging advises that awareness of mediation
is essential to helping the voice of Indigenous writers live within a print
medium. The work of collaboration and respect is essential to this:
“[T]he key to working in a culturally appropriate way is to collaborate
with Indigenous Peoples at the centre of a work. Collaboration ensures
4 For a definition of settler colonialism and its politics of acquisition, see Coulthard
151–152.
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that works do not speak for Indigenous Peoples. It ensures that works
are Indigenous Peoples speaking” (Younging 31).
At the same time, the answer to problems of mediation is not to
assume that there is a pure, unmediated story out there to be told.
Indigenous storytelling traditions in North America, for example, are
all about mediation. It matters, for example, what season some sto-
ries are told, or who is listening, or whether the purpose is learning or
entertainment. Some stories are for everyone, and some are not (see
Justice 25). The work of mediation therefore does not occur outside
the traditions of Indigenous peoples, including those of Sherpa people.
What matters is how the work of collaboration occurs if a story travels
from an oral context to print, and whether Indigenous people’s ways of
knowing are respected in that collaboration or not. In the case of Ang
Tharkay’s Sherpa, the first written account made in collaboration with
a Sherpa, mediation is inevitably at the heart of its production, some-
times in ways that we would not find acceptable today. Identifying
what kinds of mediation are at work in the text will help to know how
Ang Tharkay is speaking and what he is saying about his life.
Mediation on the Level of Representation: Romanticism and
Sherpas
To return to TinTin in Tibet, the representation of Ang Tharkay that
has circulated around the world clearly needs correction by paying at-
tention to Sherpa. In TinTin in Tibet, “Tharkey” the mountain guide
attempts to turn back from the dangerous and seemingly fruitless
search for Chang but he is shamed by TinTin’s loyalty to an Asian per-
son and so, he says, as a “yellow man” like Chang, he feels that he must
live up to TinTin’s example (Hergé 41). It is doubtful that a Sherpa
would ever describe himself as “yellow” and would see himself as akin
to a Chinese person, since Tibet had been annexed and occupied by
China in 1959 after China brutally crushed an uprising in Lhasa (see
Shetty). The decision of Tharkey to follow TinTin into danger there-
fore depends on a neo-colonial image of Sherpas as strong, brave, and
knowledgeable, but ultimately, they are not depicted as adventurous
or loyal enough on their own. That is why Tharkey is made to serve
a white European employer who turns out to be a better example of
loyalty than he is himself, although his climbing and guiding skills are
superior to the people he serves. Sherpas, in this version of events, need
European ideas of adventure in order to become their best climbing
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132
selves. In service to European climbers, they are often pictured as real-
izing those selves. These same accounts are careful to say that such a
climber is not motivated by money: in the comic, for example, TinTin
pays Tharkey for his initial guiding work, but Tharkay comes back to
help TinTin for free.
The image of Ang Tharkay as strong and yet devoted, and as some-
one who is motivated by more than money, was common in European
climbing accounts about Sherpas until very recently. Herzog himself in
Annapurna praises Ang Tharkay and other Sherpas for their willingness
to serve, but when Ang Tharkay declines an offer to go to the summit
with him, he wonders why, after all their effort, their “trustworthi-
ness and loyalty,” and the fact that they enjoy the mountains, Sherpas
would not want to accompany the sahibs (masters) to the summit.
“How oddly their minds worked,” Herzog muses, even as he admits
that perhaps the Sherpas in their turn would find his own motivations
strange (Herzog 150–151). In his account too, the Sherpas are often
comically unable to climb ice and snow and must be taught to do so
by the French climbers (see Herzog 123–124). Unlike many British
climbers who did not even record Sherpa names in early expedition
accounts, Herzog at least says who the Sherpas were on Annapurna,
and he seems to understand that perhaps their motivations are different
from his own. But even he pictures them within Orientalist stereotypes
as eager to serve Europeans rather than as people working in a danger-
ous job who need the money.
According to Sherry B. Ortner, European mountaineers from the
1920s to the 1970s commonly described the Sherpas as childlike and
innocent in just this way, often stressing “that the Sherpas certainly
did not climb for money,” but for their love of adventure and ser-
vice (Ortner 44). In such accounts they were also pictured as in need
of European discipline and focus. This image of Sherpa motivations
served to connect Sherpa goals to European goals, whether this was
accurate or not, and to recalibrate mountaineering expeditions as ide-
alist, and not economic, in nature (see Ortner 43–46). In the case of
Ang Tharkay, the picture painted of him often is rapturous. He is often
represented as indicative of the Sherpa dedication to service. Herzog’s
account of Ang Tharkay, and tributes to him by other climbers, nota-
bly Eric Shipton and Michael Ward, celebrate Ang Tharkay as selfless,
dedicated, cheerful, and unambitious, the best of his people (see Ward
182). But in all these accounts, Ang Tharkay’s own thoughts and moti-
vations apart from his acts of service hardly appear. Like Tharkey in
TinTin in Tibet, he mostly seems to say what European people want to
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hear, and appears as a servant who wants to be there: when (unasked) he
brings tea to the climbers in bed in A Mountain Called Nun Kun, Ang
Tharkay is praised because he did something for the climbers on his
own initiative. Bernard Pierre uses this occasion to reflect that Sherpas
like Ang Tharkay are “obliging” but not “servile” (Pierre 115).
Such is the picture of Ang Tharkay and the basis for his fame as
a good and faithful servant. This picture is incomplete, relying only
on what non-Sherpas think about Sherpa labor and culture, and not
on what Sherpas have to say for themselves about the jobs they do.
Climbing in the Himalayas is changing, a situation that has given
rise to many laments for the days when Everest, or Annapurna, or
Kanchenjunga, were unspoiled by mountain tourism (see Krakauer
24–25). But such an attitude leaves out important considerations
about Sherpa labor conditions, because “unspoiled” for non-Sherpa
climbers actually meant impoverishment for many Sherpas who lived
in harsh mountain environments with little opportunity, and unac-
ceptable labor conditions for Sherpa climbers who were underpaid,
unprotected, and poorly compensated for difficult and dangerous work
(see Adhikari). Moreover, as the British-run Himalayan Club began to
regulate wages for Sherpas in the 1920s, Sherpas began to protest the
type and amount of wages they received. Sherpas “had not grown up
in an imperialistic society and did not automatically accept the British
as superior” (Tenzing 33–34), and so Sherpa strikes and wage negotia-
tions often formed part of the work of expeditions, even in the time of
Ang Tharkay and Tenzing Norgay.
A less romanticized view of the changes to climbing means that
there are now opportunities for locals within the climbing indus-
try that can be beneficial, and Sherpas can facilitate climbing not as
workers, but as owners of climbing companies. As Sherpas and other
Nepalese climbers develop climbing and guiding careers of their own,
they are able to travel to and live in Western countries, acquiring
Western frames of knowledge that they then can use to write their own
accounts or collaborate with non-Nepalese authors. More and more,
Sherpa climbers are demanding better working conditions and respect
as a result. Some examples are recent Sherpa labor disputes on Everest
and the wide circulation of Sherpa, the documentary film about that
dispute (see Scott-Stevenson), or the interviews with Sherpa climbers
and essays by them (see Sherpa; Bashyal). Along with the publication
of Buried in the Sky by Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan, with
its lengthy interview with Sherpas about their lives, labor, and beliefs
about climbing, international attention is now focused on the working
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134
conditions of Sherpas and other Nepalese people working in the climb-
ing and tourist industries. In addition, many Sherpa no longer work
for Western climbing companies, but now run their own. The recent
success of Nimsdai Purja, a Sherpa climber from Nepal who specifically
uses his public reach to draw attention to Sherpa working conditions
(see Purja, Beyond; Purja, “‘The Politics’”), also reflects the shift away
from speaking about Sherpa and other Tibetan or Nepalese people in
climbing, and to speaking with them or listening to them. Part of the
work of listening to what Sherpa people have to say therefore involves
thinking about mediation and Sherpa stories, then and now, from the
Golden Age of first ascents in the Himalayas and Karakoram, to the
current commercial era.
The Many Levels of Mediation in Sherpa
Memoirs d’un Sherpa is a landmark in publishing work by and about
Sherpa people, but the book does not appear to have been widely read
at the time of its first publication. It was not reprinted or made into a
paperback, and today, it is a rare book. I have found only one excerpt
of it in the French youth magazine Benjamin in 1955 (“Ang Tharkay”).
Beyond an endorsement in the original edition by John Hunt, the lead-
er of the British 1953 climb of Mount Everest whose own expedition
account was translated into French and published by the same press,
Amiot-Dumont, there appears to have been no public awareness of the
book at all in France or beyond it when it first appeared.
The reasons why Ang Tharkay’s autobiography did not circulate
in France cannot be fully known, but one of them probably has to
do with its packaging as an adventure text, which is at odds with its
emphasis in the book itself on anthropological frames of reference for
Sherpa thinking. Amiot-Dumont and the company which bought the
publishers, Le Livre Contemporain, mostly published adventure and
travel books for younger readers. Memoires appeared in a series called
Bibliothèque de l’Alpinisme, edited by Bernard Pierre, a well-known
and internationally-respected French climber (see Bell Sr. et al.), who
published many travel books with Amiot-Dumont, including Un
Montagne Nomée Nun Kun in 1955, an account of a successful French
attempt on the Himalayan mountain Nun Kun. Ang Tharkay was the
sirdar on that expedition. The cover of the French and English edi-
tions of Un Montagne has an exciting illustration of climbers trying to
escape an avalanche, and the largest figure is that of Ang Tharkay him-
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135
self as he falls into the snow in the foreground. Un Montagne is firmly
placed within the tradition of adventure accounts with its opening, in
its English-language edition, “fasten your belts!”, which brings readers
right into the action (see Pierre 13), to its closing when against all odds,
the team summits and Bernard Pierre joyfully says, “we had conquered
Nun” (Pierre 174).
Unlike Pierre’s book, however, the text of Memoires d’un Sherpa
is not so firmly placed within the discourse of the adventure story.
The original cover has a picture of the Himalayas rather than an
exciting action shot or even a photo of Ang Tharkay. Un Montagne’s
preface by Sir John Hunt, the aforementioned leader of the 1953
British expedition to Everest, has the effect of authorizing Pierre as a
good expedition leader himself, particularly since Hunt makes sure
to say that Pierre climbed with him in 1950 (see Pierre ix–x). But
John Hunt merely provided an endorsement for the original text
of Memoires, found on the back cover. The original introduction
to Memoires was not by a climber, but by someone named Basil P.
Norton, who says that he wrote the text. He explains that he met
with Ang Tharkay in Kathmandu, and that he used notes based
on conversations with Ang Tharkay in Hindi, taken by “a mutual
friend” Mohan Lal Mukherjee, who then wrote the notes in English
(Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 11–12). He also says that as a non-climber, he
consulted many books, including Eric Shipton’s memoir, and that he
used information from Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, “a mem-
ber of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University
of London” (177). Fürer-Haimendorf had been to Nepal and con-
ducted ethnographic research among Sherpa people. In 1955 he pub-
lished an article about Sherpas for the Illustrated London News (see
Fürer-Haimendorf). Later, he would write The Sherpas of Nepal, the
first book by an anthropologist about Sherpa culture and religion.
The rhetoric of Sherpa reflects these multiple authorships, sometimes
in awkward ways. For example, the early chapters “My Childhood”
and “Travels to Tibet” detail trips Ang Tharkay made with his family.
They describe his family’s relationships, their poverty, how he met his
wife, and the trips to Tibet that made him curious about travel. When
he sees Darjeeling he says: “[F]or me, it was the discovery of a new
world. I found myself immersed in the magic of modern life with its
mysteries and marvels. I was like a blind man suddenly able to see.”
(Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 27) Ang Tharkay at one point says this about his
own storytelling: “May I say that I feel a bit embarrassed about telling
my story? But, after all, this is an unpretentious story, told simply as
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136
I find it deep within my memory, the only journal that I was able to
keep, as I do not know how to read or write.” (67)
Ang Tharkay’s style is grounded in oral tradition’s dependence on
memory as oracy, which involves using memory deliberately as a type
of recording or record-keeping. He also is modest about his style of
storytelling, and his own life and career, perhaps because it was not his
idea to tell this story, although we do not know who asked him to do it.
However, the third chapter, “Sherpa Country and its Inhabitants,”
is not written in the same voice. In that chapter, Ang Tharkay quotes
the British climber Eric Shipton at length in a way that he could not
have done because he did not read or write, and then says that he will
describe “my small Himalayan homeland in the way that a humble,
uneducated mountain man knows how to do” (Ang Tharkay, Sherpa
34). This is followed by an ethnographic account of the Sherpa people,
detailing the size of the territory as 650,000 hectares, followed by the
customs of marriage, birth, death, and festivals in what reads more like
an anthropological account than one Ang Tharkay might have made
himself (see Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 34–42). The ethnographic section
resembles Fürer-Haimendorf’s chapter in The Sherpas of Nepal, which
has similar descriptions of Nepalese regions and the size of the Sherpa
homelands. Even the etymology of the word “shar” “pa” as “easterner”
but of an unknown Tibetan origin (Fürer-Haimendorf 1) is echoed
in Sherpa in this way: “The term ‘Sherpa’ dates back to the time of
Tibetan rule, years and years ago. In Tibetan it means ’the Eastern
people,’ from the words sher, meaning ‘East,’ and pa, meaning ‘peo-
ple’” (Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 33). Given the first two chapters and their
focus, it is hard to believe that Ang Tharkay would quote Eric Shipton
or speak like an anthropologist. Occasionally he “says” things like “the
vicissitudes of this great adventure” (139) or “the sahibs undertook a
scrupulous reconnaissance of the area” (84), things that do not sound
like the rest of the text. It appears therefore that Fürer-Haimendorf
may have contributed material from his article and book in addition to
providing advice, or that Basil P. Norton used such material liberally.
The circumstances of production for the original text help to explain
how such inconsistencies came to be, and perhaps why the book was
not widely read. There is another, important problem with the original
text as well. Basil P. Norton’s introduction to the original text begins in
the following way: “It is often difficult to explain how things happen.”
(Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 11) It is certainly true in this case, since Basil P.
Norton appears to be a pseudonym. The fact-checkers for Mountaineers
Books note that “it is unclear who Basil P. Norton was, or if there ever
Julie Rak: Mediation, Then and Now: Ang Tharkay’s Sherpa and Memoires d’un Sherpa
137
was such a person” (181). Because Norton does not appear to be real,
it is not possible to know whether his description of the composition
process is accurate, and it is unknown why the real author concealed
their identity. We do know that Norton could not authorize the book
for the world of French climbing, since he was unknown. In an adven-
ture series aimed at fans of climbing, this makes for an awkward juxta-
position of different kinds of styles, edited by someone who could not
authorize the text as John Hunt or Eric Shipton could do. We know
too that the level of mediation in the text is significant because Norton
was not who he said he was, and it may be even more complex than it
appears in Norton’s introduction, where there are already many levels
of mediation present.
According to Norton, he met Ang Tharkay in Kathmandu, the capi-
tal of Nepal. Ang Tharkay “spoke only a little English” and so Norton
relied on Mohan Lal Mukherjee, who transcribed and translated Ang
Tharkay’s story from Nepali into English (Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 11).
Norton “simply referred to the notes” and to Ang Tharkay’s “faithful
memories,” fashioning the stories into a book “faithful to the truth but
also readable” (12). Even if Norton were real, the Ang Tharkay’s story
is mediated in many ways already: he told it to Mukherjee in Hindi,
which is not his first language.5 Mukherjee transcribed his notes into
English. The book was then translated into French. In addition to these
layers of mediation, Norton says that he is not a mountaineer and so
read many books about climbing to give him the right context (see Ang
Tharkay, Sherpa 12–13): these books, including Shipton’s, would not
have been written by Sherpas and probably would not include their
perspectives. In addition, in the acknowledgements the editors thank
Fürer-Haimendorf for reading over parts of the manuscript. The edi-
tors call him “the only expert who conducted a serious ethnographic
study in the land of the Sherpas” (177). In keeping with Orientalist
thinking of the time, a non-Sherpa anthropologist is cited as an expert
and given considerable control over how Sherpa are to be represented,
perhaps even writing significant parts of the text that Ang Tharkay
could not have provided himself. A non-Sherpa editor compiled the
text, presumably without consulting Ang Tharkay about how his sto-
ries were to appear.
In addition to all this, there is another layer of mediation. The book
was translated into French by Henri Delgove. Delgove had translated
5 Who Mukherjee is, whether he actually had a role in transcription or where he
did this work, remains unknown.
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
138
William Faulkner among other important authors. But Memoirs d’un
Sherpa was not a literary work: it was part of a series about mountain-
eering adventure. That series included another book by Pierre called
La Conquȇte du Salcantay: Géant des Andes (The Conquest of Salcantay:
Giant of the Andes), a translation of The Face of Everest by Eric Shipton,
and La Face W des Drus (The West Face of the Drus) by another well-
known French climber, Guido Magnone.6 The result is a heavily medi-
ated text, despite the fact that Basil P. Norton’s final paragraph claims
there is no mediation in the memoir at all: “This is a sincere, unaltered
story told by an unsophisticated mountain man, whose singular pas-
sion it was to follow the Himalayan explorers in their attempts to con-
quer the world’s highest peaks.” (Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 14)
The original edition of Sherpa therefore was designed to be an
adventure story in keeping with the other stories in circulation about
first ascents in the Himalayas and the Alps, and it was even excerpted in
a children’s adventure magazine to build that particular audience. But
the story itself does not participate in the discourse of adventure in the
same way that the other titles do, because of the anthropological frames
within it, and perhaps because “Basil P. Norton” was not a recogniz-
able person to the French mountaineering community in the way that
Pierre, Shipton, and Magnone were. It is curious that Bernard Pierre
shares the same first initials as Basil P. Norton, and that Pierre knew
Ang Tharkay very well from the Nun Kun expedition. Ang Tharkay
was in Paris in 1953 to accept an award for his work on Annapurna, at
the time that he would have been interviewed for Memoires. It is con-
ceivable that Pierre, with assistance, actually did write the book. But
whether Pierre was in fact Norton, or if he was, why he would have
hidden his identity and pretended that the book was translated from
English to French is unknown. What we do know is that Memoires was
subjected to multiple authorship and mediation in ways that probably
meant that it was not well received by an audience that enjoyed read-
ing exciting first-hand accounts of alpine adventures in Europe and the
Himalayas. Sherpas were presumably of little interest to such an audi-
ence, except as background and local color, which is how they were to
be seen for the next forty years.
This description of a text that must be peeled back like an onion to
understand its production does several things: it obscures the circum-
6 I have yet to find information about this series at Amiot-Dumont in the
archives. These titles, including Les memoires d’un Sherpa, are on the back cover of
the original edition.
Julie Rak: Mediation, Then and Now: Ang Tharkay’s Sherpa and Memoires d’un Sherpa
139
stances of its making, romanticizes the work of life writing itself, and
perpetuates the familiar, colonial picture of Sherpas as unsophisticated,
servile, and unambitious for themselves as they help the real climbers
conquer. The layers of mediation that obscure the work and even iden-
tity of Basil P. Norton mean that more mediation is rendered invisible
too. There is no way to know why it was that Ang Tharkay agreed to
share his story, whether he was compensated for doing so, where he
was when he did it, who Mohan Lal Mukherjee was, where the original
English-language manuscript is now, and even if there was an English-
language manuscript at all. It might seem as if these unknowns make
it too hard to read this book as anything other than a work of cultural
appropriation, but I would argue that it is still possible to read Sherpa
as Ang Tharkay’s story. However, a reading of Sherpa does need to
be attentive to the different kinds of textual and paratextual rhetoric
which occur.
This is the context for the reprint and translation into English of
Sherpa. The more recent edition also had considerable paratextual work
that mediates Ang Tharkay’s story, although in this case, the work is
presented in a more transparent way, and it includes the voices of Ang
Tharkay’s relatives. Sherpa was commissioned by Mountaineers Books,
which acquired a rare copy of the text through Bill Petroske and had
Corrinne McKay translate it. The press arranged for Ang Tharkay’s son
Dawa Sherpa and Tashi Sherpa (Tenzing Norgay’s grandson) to pro-
vide an afterword and a preface respectively, and through the work of
Bill Buxton and Bob A. Schelfhout Aubertiijn, there is extensive fact-
checking and footnoting (see Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 177).
The effect of the paratextual work, which includes the words of
Ang Tharkay’s relatives, helps to swing the text away from assumptions
about Sherpa cheerfulness and servility. For example, an early chapter
details how Ang Tharkay longed to become a mountaineer, so much
so that his “imagination ran wild” when he met another Sherpa, Nim
Tharkay, who had been on an expedition and who showed him the
clothing he had been given (Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 45). Ang Tharkay’s
account provides a romantic desire for adventure. In another example,
the introduction describes Ang Tharkay as servile: “[T]he only thing
he [Ang Tharkay] wanted was to be of service to the ‘sahibs,’ to help
them in their audacious attempts to conquer the dangerous giants of
the Himalayas, and to rejoice in their successes as if they were his own.”
(12) But in his afterword, Dawa Sherpa, Ang Tharkay’s son, adjusts this
romantic picture of a Sherpa who loved to climb and wanted to serve.
He says that his father never told his children to become climbers and
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
140
that he said this to them: “My father used to tell us, ‘You must go to
school to an education for a better job and for a better life. Forget about
going to the mountains as a Sherpa on expeditions. Life as a Sherpa is
not a joke. It is real hard and you would not earn a good salary.’” (176)
Ang Tharkay here does not sound like a Sherpa who did his job for
the love of it, and he appears much more realistic about the dangerous
and hardships of life as a climbing Sherpa. This view of Ang Tharkay
is therefore a direct corrective to romanticism about him and about
Sherpa labor conditions. At other places in the text, Ang Tharkay indi-
cates that he went on expeditions because he and his family needed the
money, and not because of an abstract love he had for the mountains, a
life he calls “brutal and dangerous” (Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 19). At times,
he says, “we were barely paid enough to eat,” and he says that he was
“exhausted from fatigue” during Eric Shipton’s expedition to Everest
in 1933 (35). Therefore, the text’s gaps in the narrative and paratexts by
his relatives do provide a look at what it was actually like to be a Sherpa
climber, and what Ang Tharkay found it to be.
In the forward to Sherpa, Ang Tharkay’s nephew Tashi Sherpa
makes sure to say that “he was an equal in an exclusive club with
Shipton, Tilman, Herzog, Hillary, and of course Tenzing Norgay”
(Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 7). Tashi Sherpa’s words constitute another
resistance to the narrative of cheerful servility. In Sherpa, for example,
Ang Tharkay assesses his treatment by British expeditions, and finds
it wanting, saying that in 1933, “life in base camp held no real appeal
for us Sherpas. The expedition organizers barely treated us as humans,”
denying them even the use of latrines (53). By contrast, French climb-
ers “made no distinction between themselves and us. This was a new
and very pleasant experience. This way of working filled us with enthu-
siasm. Never on any expedition whatsoever before, had we felt such a
sense of freedom and closeness with the sahibs. We felt a bond of cama-
raderie between us” (125). Tenzing Norgay says similar things in Man
of Everest about climbing with Swiss climbers. He says that the Swiss
treated him “as one of the climbing team and a real expedition mem-
ber” (Norgay and Ullman 197), contrasting their attitude with that of
the British, who did not provide toilet facilities for Sherpas in 1953. In
the same way, Ang Tharkay felt on early expeditions that Sherpa were
being treated as coolies, and not as members (see Ang Tharkay, Sherpa
230–231). These observations are important for the historical record in
terms of the treatment of Sherpas, but they are also important because
they show what Ang Tharkay and Tenzing value: equality, dignity, and
respect in work and play. It is a view of Sherpa labor which does not
Julie Rak: Mediation, Then and Now: Ang Tharkay’s Sherpa and Memoires d’un Sherpa
141
ignore its difficulties or its economics, but which also makes clear when
mistreatment and disrespect occur. In many early climbing accounts,
Sherpa strikes are seen as inconveniences for climbers, an irritation.
Ang Tharkay explains why they happen and how to work towards solu-
tions. He describes how he did this with Eric Shipton in 1935 when
Sherpas were treated like porters and not as they thought they should
be treated (see Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 60).
Conclusion
In his preface to Sherpa, Ang Tharkay’s grandson Tashi Sherpa won-
ders whether his grandfather would “still smile his blessings because
so many after him have achieved new glories on the path his genera-
tion blazed so painstakingly” (Ang Tharkay, Sherpa 10). Perhaps he
would: at the end of Beyond Possible, Nimsdai Purja says that after he
climbed the fourteen highest mountains in the world in six months
and six days, “it was great to know that the rep of the Nepalese Sherpa
guide had also been amplified” (Purja, Beyond 287). In an article for
Climbing, Purja says that his goal was to bring awareness of Sherpa
ability and working conditions:
Project Possible was my way of thrusting Sherpa culture into the limelight.
For too long, the climbing industry had overlooked their heroic work. As far
as I was concerned, they had been the driving force behind a lot of successful
expeditions above 8,000 meters—and a support network of Sherpas that per-
formed the heavy lifting propelled most against-all-odds expeditions. (Purja,
“‘The Politics’”)
Because of the work of mediation, we can know today that Purja’s
desire to help his own people is an extension of Ang Tharkay’s own
trail-blazing work, of which Sherpa forms a part. We can know more
of what Ang Tharkay did in the mountains, and why, in his own
words and in the words of his descendants. Mediation can therefore
work to bring Ang Tharkay’s perspective to us now, rather than ob-
scure what he wanted to say through numerous editorial interven-
tions, as was the case decades ago. We can never know the so-called
authentic story of Ang Tharkay as he would have told it directly. But
the desire to imagine Indigenous storytelling as unmediated serves to
remove it from the work of culture and assign it to nature, away from
Indigenous sovereignty over the stories they tell. Ang Tharkay had a
complex tale to tell, and its journey to readers is of necessity complex
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
142
as well. That is the reason why it is imperative to know how Sherpa
was and is mediated, and hear Ang Tharkay’s voice today, decades
after he gave his story to others.
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Mediacija nekoč in danes: Sherpa in Memoires
d’un Sherpa Anga Tharkaya
Ključne besede: avtobiografska književnost / alpinizem / šerpe / Ang Tharkay / spomini /
literarno posredništvo
Spomini Anga Tharkaya, znanega alpinističnega vodnika in vodje šerp iz zgo-
dnjega obdobja himalajskega alpinizma, postavljajo sodobnega bralca pred več
izzivov. Knjiga Memoires d'un Sherpa (Spomini nekega šerpe) je po objavi leta
1954 utonila v pozabo, a je nato v prevodu iz francoščine v angleščino leta
2016 doživela ponovno izdajo z naslovom Sherpa. Ker je njen urednik, preva-
jalec in prepisovalec občutno posegel v izvirno besedilo, se postavlja vprašanje,
ali lahko Sherpo sploh beremo kot življenjsko zgodbo Anga Tharkaya. Zasto-
pam stališče, da lahko, pravzaprav moramo, seveda z vso potrebno občutlji-
vostjo in ob tem, da upoštevamo raznolikost posegov v besedilo. Slednjim je
podvrženo prav vsako izdano delo, zato je treba razmisliti o tem, kaj je medi-
acija, čigavim interesom služi in kakšno vlogo je imela pri pisanju in branju
dela Sherpa. Mediacija v memoarskem diskurzu vpliva na vsako pripoved, tako
o preteklosti kot sedanjosti. Če želimo slišati, kaj so imeli povedati plezalci iz
Nepala v petdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja ter kako povsem mogoče, celo
nujno je, da slišimo te glasove v vsej njihovi kompleksnosti tudi danes, da bi
postavili pod vprašaj romantične ideje o šerpah, ki vztrajajo v gorniški lite-
raturi, je bistvenega pomena vedeti, kako deluje mediacija v spominih Anga
Tharkaya. Na ta način lahko povežemo zgodbe prvih šerp o problemih dela z
vprašanji, o katerih šerpe pišejo danes.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 82.0-94:796.526(541.35)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v45.i3.08