What do you know about epigraphs?

In Aotearoa New Zealand, we have three official languages: English; Māori; and sign. A while ago, I was wanting to use a Whakataukī (a Māori 'proverb', but the meaning aligns more to a 'sharing of a cultural treasure') to set the tone for my PhD. 

The Whakataukī is: “Ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tīnā. Ko te pae tāwhiti, whaia, kia tata" It was written/shared by Professor Sir Mason Durie - himself a national treasure - with the The Royal Society of New Zealand (Maori name Te Apārangi) for their 2015 report, Our Futures Te Pae Tāwhiti. 

I could simply APA parenthetically cite it as: 

“Ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tīnā. Ko te pae tāwhiti, whaia, kia tata" (“manage today and shape tomorrow”; Durie, as cited by The Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi, 2015, p. 4)

BUT. I think there are two potential errors with this approach. Firstly, I don't know how I should include the translation into English. Secondly, while the translation is on the same page (p. 4), it feels more 'correct' to have the translation within the citation bracket. So I emailed the APA Style Blog. They suggested that the translation should go in square brackets, as follows:

“Ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tīnā. Ko te pae tāwhiti, whaia, kia tata” [Manage today and shape tomorrow] (Durie, as cited in The Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi, 2015, p. 4)

All good. And then I had the idea of using this as an epigraph to lead my work. An epigraph is "a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme" (Merriam-Webster, 2022). Epigraphs set the tone for what is to come, "fore-shadowing" the mahi (Proofed, 2022). What I have above is not formatted as an epigraph, but I wanted to know how to do it (should I chose to do so). So I turned to the latest APA publication manual (2019), where section 8.35 looks at epigraphs.

There are several things we need to know. We need to know what the item was published within. We need to know our formatting: "The epigraph should appear before the first line of text and should be indented 0.5 in. from the left margin, like a block quotation, without quotation marks" (APA, 2019, p. 277), and we put the epigraphic source "on the line below the quotation, [and] provide the credit line [which] consist[s] of an em dash and then the author’s full name, a comma, and the title of the work in which the quotation appeared", right-aligned (p. 178). So that is - for the metric speaking world - indented by 1.3cm. See the example in the image accompanying this post.

What I found interesting is that the epigraphic source only appears in the reference list if it is an academic source, or has been touched on elsewhere in the work. And then there are the tricky issues of dates. Attributed author birth and death dates are often included, so we need to know the dates the author lived (if historic). According to the APA Style blog gurus, there "aren’t any guidelines about how to include information about the age of the person or whether they are still living, so I would just follow convention, which is to use a dash with nothing after it to indicate someone is still alive" (Chelsea Lee, personal communication, 24 April 2018). So, if our author is still living, we leave an open em dash at the end of the year.

For my Whakataukī, then, the format would be:

Original in text APA citations	Reformatted as epigraphs
“Ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tīnā. Ko te pae tāwhiti, whaia, kia tata” [“manage today and shape tomorrow”] (Durie, as cited by Te Apārangi The Royal Society of New Zealand, 2015, p. 4).	Ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tīnā. Ko te pae tāwhiti, whaia, kia tata [manage today and shape tomorrow]. —Sir Mason Harold Durie KNZM, Our Futures Te Pae Tāwhiti, 1938-
“we see things not as they are, we see them as we are” (quote attributed to Kant by Scharling, 1876, p. 211).	…we see things not as they are, we see them as we are. —attributed to Kant by Henrik C. Scharling, Nicolai’s Marriage (Volume 2 of 2), 1836-1920.

And remembering that our epigraphs in the right-hand column should also be indented 1.3cm from the left of our page. This was a very interesting learning experience!

Sam

References:

American Psychological Association. (2019). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: The official guide to APA style (7th ed.). Author.

Merriam-Webster. (2022). Epigraph. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epigraph

Proofed. (2022). What Is an Epigraph? And How Do I Write One?. https://proofed.com/writing-tips/what-is-an-epigraph-and-how-do-i-write-one/

Scharling, H. (1876). Nicolai’s Marriage: A Picture of Danish Family Life (Translated from Danish, Volume 2 of 2). Richard Bentley and Son.

Te Apārangi The Royal Society of New Zealand. (2014). Our Futures Te Pae Tāwhiti: The 2013 census and New Zealand’s changing population. https://globalwomen.org.nz/assets/Uploads/resources/Our-Futures-Te-Pae-Tawhiti-Royal-Society-of-NZ-July-2014.pdf