Text, Lines, and Videotape: The Ideology of Genre and the Transcription of Traditional Native American Oral Narrative as Poetry

ROBERT DALE PARKER Text, Lines, and Videotape: The Ideology of Genre and the Transcription of Traditional Native American Oral Narrative as Poetry remarkable thing has happened over the last few decades -in the tortured history of ttanscribing and ttanslating traditional Native American oral narrative into written English literature. Two brilliant scholar-translators, Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock, have made curiously similar and extravagant claims for how traditional Native American oral narrative should be put into writing, and their methods have become canonical. Hymes argues that Native American oral story should be written as "verse," and Tedlock argues that it should be written as "poetry." As a particular practice, there is nothing wrong with transcribing oral story as poetry or verse, and in the hands ofHymes and Tedlock it has led to exceptionally good translations. But as a canonical practice or an interpretation ofnarrative orality, it causes serious problems.1 The ttanslation of Native oral forms into written poetic forms has a long history. Although the line divisions of poetry are visual and written , certain forms, especially song and ritual, seem to fit what readers often assume they "hear" when they read poems. For an early example in English, scholars point to Henry Timberlake's 1 765 Cherokee "WarSong " in heroic couplets: "Like men we go, to meet our country's foes,/ Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 3, Autumn 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 142Robert Dale Parker Who, woman-like, shall fly our dreaded blows."2 From Timberlake, to Teddy Roosevelt's endorsement of Natalie Curtis' influential The Indians ' Book ("These songs cast a wholly new light—on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm—the charm of a vanished elder world—of Indian poetry"), to Paul Zolbrod's modern edition of the Navajo creation story, admirers have called on the term "poetry" as a generalized figure of praise for Native eloquence.' As early as 1815, Walter Channing celebrated "the oral literature" of American "aborigines" as "the very language for poetry." An anonymous 1840 article suggests that "the trochee predominates" in Indian songs and that "The polysyllabic character of the songs is adverse to short lively metres."4 In their desire to write Native oral forms into the sanctified status of "literature," many nineteenth-century commentators anticipate later scholars. Taking prosody as a defining metonymy of poetry, they seem to believe that the discovery of meter will propel oral forms into the mystified status of "poetry" and "literature." In the late 1840s, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose Aigic Researches (1839) began the large-scale translation ofNative oral narrative into English, and whom Longfellow drew on for his 1855 Song of Hiawatha, published a questionnaire about "Indian Songs" that asked "Is there any rhyme in them? Are the words collocated so as to observe the laws of quantity? In other words, are they measured, or are the accents in them found to recur in fixed and regular intervals?" As William M. Clements puts it, when Schoolctaft "did not find such features in the [song] matetial he was translating . . . he added them."5 Eventually, many translators produced three texts: a transliteration, a "literal translation," and a "free translation" in more idiomatic ot literary English. That practice helped blur—or multiply—the lines between ethnology, "folklore," and "literature." One of the most famous translators , Washington Matthews, whose "free translation" of a Navajo prayer N. Scott Momaday drew on for the title of his landmark novel House Made of Dawn,6 welcomed poets who might draw on his translations , but warned them not to "garble or distort." Matthews referred to songs—but not to prayers or "legends"—as if they were poems.7 As it happens, the reception history of Matthews' ttanslations of songs and prayers conflated them both into poetty almost indiscriminately . First came Curtis' influential collection, where (with an oddly Text, Lines, and Videotape143 false sense of novelty) she explained that "the songs in this book are written after a new manner in that corresponding musical phrases are placed one beneath another like lines of verse. This system makes the form of the song to flash before the eye like the fotm...