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Translating Performance in the Written Text Verse Structure in Dakota and Hocák Lynn Burley We all know someone who can really tell a story—a person whose voice commands our attention, who encourages us to lean closer, waiting for the next detail, the next twist in the story. This person’s talent may be learned or intuitive, but part of the artistry he or she displays comes from our expectations of a story, our Western culture that dictates how a story is to be told and how a story is to unfold. We learned about stories long before we started school, in our nursery tales, our fairy tales, our children’s books, and while the stories got longer and more complex as we got older, the basics never really changed much. For many of us, the major change was the venue; we no longer listened to stories, but read them. Even the occasional trip to the theater or the nightly drama of television was not really the telling of a story in the same fashion, because the visuals changed the fundamental act. We generally do not see a story as a performance when we read it, although we greatly appreciate those who can perform a story; they are always the ones in the center of a group of people at any get-together. Our Western stories are not written with a performance in mind. We expect our comfortable and reassuring patterns: the paragraphs and the chapters , laid out in the familiar book form. How, then, do we learn to read a whole new set of stories that are meant to be, first and foremost, performances , when the form they come to us in lacks any indication of the performance? Some would say we should not take the performance and turn it into the written story, particularly if we are going to turn it into 326 the Western story and obliterate any resemblance to the original performance . Others, like myself, say that while a performance would be the best way to hear these stories, we cannot rely solely on that method. The stories might be lost forever, or never reach as large an audience as possible , or deny people the treasures of Native American stories because they do not have the opportunity to hear them. Many of the Native American stories that we have today were originally collected in the early twentieth century by linguists who worked with many tribes, documenting their languages. During this era, texts were collected from many communities as data for linguistic and ethnographic study. These texts were written in block form with little attention to structure (Sherzer and Woodbury 1987). For instance, Paul Radin’s work in “Winnebago Texts” of 1908 to 1912 is pages of paragraph-style text, despite the fact that Winnebago (since renamed Hocák) is best suited to a verse structure and does not conform easily to paragraphs. While Radin did note where some pauses occurred in several passages and did divide the passages into lines, no attempt was made during the translation or in the subsequent publication in English as The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956) to preserve any narrative structure of the original. Other narratives suffered a similar fate. Stith Thompson’s Tales of the North American Indians (1929), a collection from about fifty tribes, are all written in paragraph form even though all of them were originally performances . Zuni myths collected in the 1880s were often simply translated in outline form, and sometimes additional lines or whole passages not in the originals were added to the translations, presumably to make them more accessible to westerners. Other stories of the Zuni were just summaries, and these were published in a different order than the Zuni intended the stories to be heard (Tedlock 1983). The order of the stories in many Native American cultures is important, because the stories either build upon one another or are meant to be heard at only certain times of the year. Others during this era—particularly Franz Boas, an anthropologist, and his students, but others were also involved—collected and translated myths and stories without attention to the narrative structure from such tribes as the Navajo, Hopi, Coos, Caddo, Kwakiutl, Dakota, Wishram, and others (see Bierhorst 1985; Hymes 1981; Sherzer and Woodbury 1987). For example, Stephen Riggs in Dakota Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography Translating Performance in the Written Text 327 [3.140.198.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 14:20...

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