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“How Corn Maiden Lost Her Corn,” as Told by Haciano Felipe to Karl Theodor Preuss
- Marvels & Tales
- Wayne State University Press
- Volume 28, Number 2, 2014
- pp. 369-393
- 10.13110/marvelstales.28.2.0369
- Article
- Additional Information
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Departing from motifs in well-known Corn Maiden stories, this Cora tale provides no account of the advent of maize horticulture. Instead, the story from Karl Theodor Preuss’s ethnology of Nayarit, Mexico, starts with a comic fool haplessly married to a demigod. The tale develops into a darker story of loss and compromise. Haciano Felipe, the verbal artist who told the story, is sublated by Preuss’s imperial-period methodology, which par¬allels losses in the Corn Maiden story itself. This translation crosses generations of copying, illustrating problems in the relationship between translator and “original.”