SAIL Ser.2, 4.2

{inside front cover}

General Editors: Helen Jaskoski and Robert M. Nelson
Poetry/Fiction: Joseph W. Bruchac III
Editor Emeritus: Karl Kroeber
Assistant to the Editor: Lynn Poncin

SAIL - Studies in American Indian Literatures is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. The journal publishes reviews, interviews, bibliographies, creative work including transcriptions of performances, and scholarly and theoretical articles on any aspect of American Indian literature including traditional oral material in dual-language format or translation, written works, and live and media performances of verbal art.

SAIL is published quarterly by the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. Individual membership rates for 1992 are $25 (regular) and $16 (limited income); the institutional rate is $35. All payments must be in U.S. dollars. Limited quantities of SAIL volume 1 (1989) and volume 3 (1991) are available to individuals at $16 the volume and to institutions at $24 the volume.

Manuscripts should follow MLA format; please submit three copies with SASE to
Helen Jaskoski
SAIL
Department of English
California State University Fullerton
Fullerton, California 92634

Creative work should be addressed to
Joseph Bruchac, Poetry/Fiction Editor
The Greenfield Review Press
2 Middle Grove Avenue
Greenfield Center, New York 12833

For advertising and subscription information please write to
Elizabeth H. McDade
Box 112
University of Richmond, Virginia 23173

Production of this issue supported by the University of Richmond.

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SAIL

Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2 4.2 & 4.3 Summer/Fall 1992

CONTENTS

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD? AN INTRODUCTION
Helen Jaskoski . . . . . 1

A COMPARISON OF THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF A MAYAN TEXT, THE POPOL VUH
Denise Low . . . . . 15

"HONORATISSIMI BENEFACTORES": NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS AND TWO SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TEXTS IN THE UNIVERSITY TRADITION
Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing-Reichel . 35

"PRAY SIR, CONSIDER A LITTLE": RITUALS OF SUBORDINATION AND STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE IN THE LETTERS OF HEZEKIAH CALVIN AND DAVID FOWLER TO ELEAZAR WHEELOCK, 1764-1768
Laura Murray . . . . . 48

INTRODUCTION: SAMSON OCCOM'S SERMON PREACHED . . . AT THE EXECUTION OF MOSES PAUL
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff . . . . 75

A SERMON PREACHED BY SAMSON OCCOM . . . AT THE EXECUTION OF MOSES PAUL, AN INDIAN
Samson Occom . . . . . 82

SPACE AND FREEDOM IN THE GOLDEN REPUBLIC: YELLOW BIRD'S THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUIN MURIETA,THE CELEBRATED CALIFORNIA BANDIT
John Lowe . . . . . 106

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AN INTRODUCTION TO WYNEMA, A CHILD OF THE FOREST BY SOPHIA ALICE CALLAHAN
Annette Van Dyke . . . . 123

TWO CHAPTERS FROM WYNEMA, A CHILD OF THE FOREST
Sophia Alice Callahan . . . . 129

EVOLUTION OF ALEX POSEY'S FUS FIXICO PERSONA
Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr. . . . . 136

AN INDIAN, AN AMERICAN: ETHNICITY, ASSIMILATION AND BALANCE IN CHARLES EASTMAN'S FROM THE DEEP WOODS TO CIVILIZATION
Erik Peterson . . . . . 145

THE EVOLUTION OF MOURNING DOVE'S COYOTE STORIES
Alanna Kathleen Brown . . . . 161

RE-VISIONS: AN EARLY VERSION OF THE SURROUNDED
Birgit Hans . . . . . 181

COMMENTARY
        Copway on Cooper                 .                .               .                .        196
        According to Iktomi               .                .               .                .        197
        From the Editors                     .                .               .                .        200
        SAIL Receives NEA Grant      .                .               .                .        200
        Call for Papers on Critical Approaches   .                .                .        201
        Call for Papers on Feminist and Post-Colonial Approaches     .         201
        Call for Papers on Film, Drama and Theater            .                 .        201
        The Four Directions                .                .               .                .        202

REVIEWS
A Guide to Early Field Recordings at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology. Richard Keeling
William Bright . . . . . 203

On Our Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot. Ed. Barry O'Connell.
Jane Hipolito . . . . . 205

To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. Lucy Thompson, Che-Na-Wah Weitch-A-Wah
Helen Jaskoski . . . . . 207

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Waterlily. Ella Cara Deloria
Alanna Kathleen Brown . . . . 210

John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works. James W. Parins
Rodney Simard . . . . . 212

American Indian Literature: An Anthology. Ed. Alan Velie
Andrew Wiget . . . . . 215

Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders. Julie Cruikshank
James Ruppert . . . . . 218

Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories. Ed. Craig Lesley
Arlene Hirschfelder . . . . 220

Drawings of the Song Animals. Duane Niatum
Roger Weaver . . . . . 223

BRIEFLY NOTED . . . . . 225

CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . 227

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Glyphs from the Dresden Codex are reproduced from the drawings in Codices Mayas: Reproducidos y Desarrollados por J. Antonio Villacorta y Carlos A. Villacorta (De la Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala) 2nd ed. Guatemala, C.A.: La Tipografia Nacional, 1977.

Reproduction of the manuscript page of the Popol Vuh is by courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

The passage from Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, from the translation of Adrián Recinos, coypright © 1950 by the University of Oklahoma Press, is reprinted with the permission of the University of Oklahoma Press.

SAIL acknowledges with gratitude permission from Munro Edmonson to reprint a passage from The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1971).

SAIL is also grateful to Dennis Tedlock for permission to reprint a portion of Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).

The editors express thanks for consultation on translations from Latin to Daniel A. Brown, Professor of Latin and Religious Studies, California State University Fullerton.

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1992 Patrons:
University College of the University of Cincinnati
English Department of Virginia Commonwealth University
Department of English, Western Washington University
University of Richmond
Firebrand Books
Karl Kroeber
[anonymous]

1992 Sponsor:
Robert F. Sayre, University of Iowa

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MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD? AN INTRODUCTION
Helen Jaskoski

In the beginning God created the Indian, the real or genuine man, and the white man. The Indian was the elder and in his hands the Creator placed a book; in the hands of the other he placed a bow and arrow, with a command that they should both make good use of them. The Indian was very slow in receiving the book, and appeared so indifferent about it that the white man came and stole it from him when his attention was directed another way. He was then compelled to take the bow and arrow, and gain his subsistence by pursuing the chase. He had thus forfeited the book which his creator had placed in his hands and which now of right belonged to his white brother.

(Grant Foreman, Sequoyah 21)

        This story, it is alleged, was told to Sequoyah by his Cherokee neighbors in an effort to dissuade him from developing and promoting his syllabary. If any such telling ever took place, it is easy to see how it must have had an effect opposite to the one intended. The facile moral tacked on to the tale reminds one of Natty Bumppo in its naive assumption of mutually exclusive "gifts" belonging to supposedly different races. What this interesting story really tells us is that writing has always already been here, simply waiting to be uncovered; that what was lost--in a mere moment of inattention--is not destroyed but rather momentarily missing, available and awaiting recovery; that either race is fit equally for pen or bow--and both; that only attentiveness and concentration will secure what really matters.
         The historical record tells us that Sequoyah's view prevailed; indeed, if the reports of contemporaries are accurate, once writing had been adopted the level of literacy among Cherokee speakers was higher than that of the country as a whole. If studies have been made of the nature and significance of texts published in Cherokee, such studies have not yet found their way into literary history. A systematic history of American Indian literature will include an account of texts published in tribal languages, as a comprehensive history of American literature will include the literature published in languages other than English. As of now, writings in Cherokee (like literature in German, Scandinavian languages, Japanese, Chinese and on down to the thriving Vietnamese press of today) are part of an invisible literature, absent generally from even the most inclusive discussions and collections of American literature. In some cases of Native American texts, notably the writings produced for Paul Radin by Winnebago authors, translations have remained in print and relatively well-known, while the existence of the originals would come as a surprise to many scholars who consider themselves well-versed in the texts. In other cases, like that of the {2} Wabanaki "Wampum Records" (Mitchell), original-language written texts are only now being made readily available. The opportunity is here. Scholarship in American literature in Spanish (e.g., Chicano, Puerto Rican) and Yiddish has begun to lead the way into this neglected side of the nation's culture. What kinds of texts have been written by Native authors in tribal languages? The question waits for investigators with the knowledge, interest and means to find out.
         Sequoyah's achievement was not the first indigenous writing system. In her study of La Cienega canyon pictography, Carol Patterson-Rudolph reminds us that "American Indians have traditionally referred to their petroglyphs as `rock writings' or `writings' in the same sense they refer to any writing system. There is a firm belief that petroglyph images are intended to transmit information that is important, whether or not it can still be `read' or understood by contemporary people" (11). As she discusses the visual designs in relation to the stories of Water Jar Boy and of Uretsete and Naotsete, Patterson-Rudolph points out that elements of the rock matrix--cracks, curves, shoulders--are part of the sign system: the earth itself becomes part of the text.

She hated Chato . . . because he had taught her to sign her name. Because it was like the old ones always told her about learning their language or any of their ways: it endangered you.

(Leslie Silko, "Lullaby," Storyteller 47)

        The earliest texts written by American Indian authors in European languages enter into dialogue with a European audience. The dialogue may be dysfunctional, as Leslie Silko's character Ayah finds; it may be empowering; it may be a matter of blind hope. When I lived in Poland in the early seventies, I learned of Polish visitors to China who had brought back jewels, furniture, and works of art; Chinese families, it was said, had given away priceless artifacts rather than see them destroyed in the cultural revolution. Some similar altruism must have motivated the unknown owner of the original Quiché version of the Popol Vuh to lend that precious text to be copied and translated, to trust--even in the bitter devastation of Spanish occupation--that this work of art would live. In her paper on "A Comparison of English Translations of a Mayan Text, the Popol Vuh" Denise Low offers a glimpse of a document as remarkable as the Rosetta stone.
        Scholarship on these earliest texts in European languages often reflects a fascination with curiosities, the location of "firsts." Yet one of the reasons they are so curious, and that gives these writings intrinsic value, is that they contradict persistent stereotypes. The general picture of indigenous peoples is often likely to be the noble {3} foresters and plainsmen depicted by James Fenimore Cooper or Kevin Costner, or (less likely now) the brutal primitives popular in the romantic fiction of the early nineteenth century. In "`Honoratissimi Benefactores': Native American Students and Two Seventeenth-Century Texts in the University Tradition" Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing-Reichel offer an important alternative when they introduce us to Harvard students assiduously penning Latin verses.
        Hochbruck and Dudensing-Reichel also raise the question of whether these particular lines were actually written by these specific students. The issue of authorship is frequently vexed in the study of American Indian literatures, especially in connection with collaborative works like translations and oral autobiographies. A similar question is related by the editor of To The American Indian by Lucy Thompson; Lucy Thompson's authorship of her book has been questioned because all the existing manuscripts are in her husband's hand. False attribution has certainly occurred, as in the case of "Seattle's Speech" (Kaiser). It is also true, however, that employment of amanuenses is a long tradition in European letters; Henry James, for instance, dictated his later novels to his typist with no damage to his standing as their author. Each collaborative relationship is unique.
        Oratory of American Indians has received a fair amount of notice, with several anthologies in and out of print during the last thirty years--notwithstanding that the accuracy of such texts in representing what was actually said is often questionable. Epistolary forms, by contrast, have mostly been ignored. In "`Pray Sir, Consider a Little . . .'" Laura Murray introduces readers to some of the earliest writings in English by American Indians, letters written to Eleazar Wheelock by his pupils and their families. Murray points out the public purpose these private documents were made to serve, in supporting fundraising for Wheelock's missionary projects. This emphasis on a public function of writing continues in Native American writing, and Murray's study opens the way for examination of other public epistles, like the letters of John Ross and the many other leaders who tirelessly wrote message after letter after declaration after document on behalf of their people to government officials, newspapers and public figures.
        SAIL's publication of Samson Occom's Sermon completes an undertaking begun over ten years ago: LaVonne Ruoff had prepared a text of the sermon along with an introduction, both to be printed in this journal's first series, but the project was never finished. Presentation of Ruoff's Introduction and Occom's sermon in these pages offers an opportunity to reflect on the problem of continuity in the history of American Indian literature. As H. David Brumble discovered when he came to study American Indian autobiographies, genetic lines of {4} descent in American Indian texts can be illusory or nonexistent: "I was right in assuming that reading Indian autobiographies had prepared me to understand Momaday. I was wrong in assuming that Momaday had read them" (Brumble 17). If The Names can profitably be read in the context of earlier Indian autobiographies, can Occom's Sermon help us understand a contemporary temperance sermon, Michael Dorris's The Broken Cord? As administrator of the American Indian Studies program at Dartmouth University, Dorris is very likely to be familiar with a text written by an American Indian who was one of that university's founders. However, Dorris replaces Occom's strenuously Christian appeal to his listeners' sense of eternal salvation or damnation with the modern, secular gospel of self-fulfillment and earthly well-being; his approach through a personal, autobiographical account contrasts with Occom's scholastic rhetoric and itself probably owes something to the tradition of Indian autobiography. What is strikingly similar in Dorris's and Occom's writings is both authors' approach to a problem that has appeared intractable: both respond to the same phenomenon, whether seen as sin or social problem, with deep feeling that transcends, in the one, a harsh and punitive religion, and in the other the reductive banality of social science. Furthermore, both authors make a conscious appeal to a dual audience, most recently evidenced in Dorris's decision to have his book dramatized for television rather than in a feature film "in the hope that more people--particularly poor women--will see the movie and better understand the dangers of drinking during pregnancy" (Rhodes). It may be that lines of descent within American Indian literary history are more profitably traced in terms of function rather than of form. The condition of colonization persists, though specific terms and features may change, and succeeding writers continue to address it, though they adapt different forms to their purposes.

      "They have a romance going with death, they love it, and they want Indians to die for them."
     Luther nodded. "Lucky thing most of us Indians wasn't reading their stories."
     "Lucky thing some of us were."

(Louis Owens, The Sharpest Sight 216)

        The nineteenth century, a period of territorial expansion on the north American continent, continued the process of colonization. Again and again treaties contained provision for schools and teachers for tribes as part of compensation for land cessions; like other provisions, these obligations were frequently unfulfilled by the United States government. Schools for Indian children were poor, often damaging, {5} sometimes fatal: the mortality rate in Indian boarding schools was scandalous. However, in spite of discouragement and often at considerable sacrifice, Indian students did become literate and schooled, and some became writers.
        Fiction by nineteenth-century American Indian authors is sparse. Littlefield and Parins' Supplement to their Biobibliography cautions that the oft-reprinted Poor Sarah; or Religion Exemplified in the Life and Death of an Indian Woman, published in the 1820s, is "attributed to" Elias Boudinot. John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, first published in 1854 and generally cited as the first novel by an American Indian author, is as John Lowe notes an unduly neglected work of the mid-century "American Renaissance" of Romantic writings. Lowe's "Space and Freedom in the Golden Republic" introduces an outsider's perspective on the exuberant expansionism celebrated by mid-century writers like Walt Whitman. In California Joaquin Murietta is alive in history as much as Jean Laffite in New Orleans or Paul Revere in Boston; the latest search for his remains--physical and literary--is documented in Richard Rodriguez' account of the campaign to bury a head said to be Joaquin's and preserved in a jar by a rock salesman in Santa Rosa.
        At the end of the century Sophia Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest represents the first known novel published by an American Indian woman. The selections from Wynema that are included in this issue and introduced by Annette Van Dyke show fiction and storytelling subordinated to the exposition of political and philosophical arguments, the depiction of Creek lifeways and the recording of history. At least one episode in Callahan's novel has resonated in recent history. In the last chapter of Wynema the narrator describes three infants found alive on the killing field at Wounded Knee and subsequently adopted; she goes on to project an idealized, successful future for the three children. In July 1991 the Los Angeles Times reported the removal to South Dakota and reinterment of the remains of Lost Bird, who as a baby girl four months old had been found alive under the body of her mother at Wounded Knee, and who was later adopted by the commander of a national guard regiment. Callahan might have been pleased to know that Clara Colby, adoptive mother of the real Lost Bird, was a dedicated suffragist leader (Harrison).
        High valuation of non-fiction writing is characteristic of nineteenth-century American Indian literature--and of nineteenth-century literature in general. The prevailing view was that while fiction might be a medium suitable for entertaining the less-educated masses, serious literature comprised such forms as sermons, essays, and histories. Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray might entertain housewives and {6} clerks, but the life of the mind was more properly engaged by writers like Ruskin, Macaulay or Newman. Recent critical theories that have been fruitfully applied to non-belletristic writings like ethnographies provide an access to non-fiction texts by Native American writers that can give a new view of American life and letters in the nineteenth century.
        Histories, speeches and other political writings by American Indians merit further study. As long ago as the 1950s David Levin showed how Romantic forms of tragedy and adventure had shaped the histories that Bancroft, Parkman and Prescott wrote of the colonizing of the western hemisphere; these New England men of letters told the story of the European conquest as a clash of forces personified in strong, complex characters. A revision of that story must include the vision of Native historians in works like David Cusick's Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827), Andrew Blackbird's History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan (1887), George Copway's Indian Life and Indian History (1851), and William Warren's History of the Ojibways, completed in 1853 but only published posthumously in 1885 (Ruoff).
        Again and again these writers were motivated by an urgently felt need to correct the historical record, to counter the kind of stereotype that Louis Owens' characters meet in their reading of the national literature. These histories could profitably be read in light of studies like Susan Paulson's of Latin American indigenous colonial texts; in her analysis of the Huarochiri Quechua manuscript Paulson maintains, among other things, that polyvocality and unconventional organization may not necessarily indicate multiple authorship or collaboration, but rather strategies for resistance and preservation. Whatever the individual circumstances of composition, in all these cases, the authors' trust--in the face of astounding destruction--in the power of language is a remarkable act of faith, and their texts bear examining for this reason alone if for no other.
        Political writings and addresses have also been neglected. The political writings of Jefferson, Crevecoeur, and Lincoln, for instance, have long been studied as fundamental in the discourse that constitutes the nation and its literature. What could be learned from study of the writings of founding statesmen of Indian Territory and, later, the State of Oklahoma--individuals like Cherokee statesman John Ross, Choctaw Governor Green McCurtain, or Cherokee Robert Latham Owen, senator from Oklahoma?

The words, visible in tight formation, thrilled her, even in her unlovely scrawl. She imagined them in crisp print upon bound white leaves, the {7} margins justified, the spacing even, snowy webs running among the fabulous words.

(N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child 178)

        The prospectus for this issue of SAIL stretched the definition of "early" written literature through the first half of the twentieth century. This period, which sees the flourishing of Wassaja and other periodicals, is a new phase in the use of writing: in addition to texts that educate and exhort, there is a sense--as Momaday's character, Grey, discovers--that writing in and of itself can give pleasure, entertain and inspire in a purely imaginative realm. The twentieth century finds the first widespread publication of fiction and poetry both in periodicals and in novels and anthologies. There is still an emphasis on non-fiction in the writings of American Indian authors, with continued experimentation and adaptation of literary forms to meet the specific expressive ends of the writers.
        Daniel F. Littlefield shows in "Evolution of Alex Posey's Fus Fixico Persona" how Alexander Posey adapted the epistolary form to social satire and political commentary. Littlefield's contextualization of Posey's writing in the tradition of American popular humor and Indian journalism offers a foundation for seeing Posey in the context of later American humorists as well. Posey's adaptation of epistolary modes anticipates Will Rogers' "Letters," and the character of Fus Fixico, with his dry, understated approach, suggests an affinity with Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Semple.
        Dialogue and collaboration continue in twentieth century writings. In "An Indian, an American" Eric Peterson dscribes how a theory of border-land, rather than margin and border, may be a more enlightening approach to writers defined as marginal. Peterson's analysis of the ways in which Charles Alexander Eastman dealt with contradiction and opposing ideas suggests fruitful lines of inquiry for the study of later writers; Vine Deloria in particular may profitably be read in light of these ideas.
        Feminist criticism and interest in women's writings in general has supported research in and reprinting of works by several early Native women writers, notably Pauline Hopkins, Zitkala Sa and Mourning Dove. The dialogue with the colonizer, implicit in the earliest writings by Native authors, emerges again as a theme in the correspondence of Mourning Dove and Lucullus McWhorter; many of the features present in letters from students of Eleazar Wheelock persist in Mourning Dove's prose a century and a half later. However, as Alanna Brown shows in "The Evolution of Mourning Dove's Coyote Stories," hard work in the face of severe difficulties and the idealism of both {8} Mourning Dove and McWhorter resulted in a collaboration of genuine mutual esteem.
        American Indian literature in English during the first half of the twentieth century is dominated by the figure of D'Arcy McNickle, who in the years since his fiction has been brought back into print has begun to receive the critical attention he and his work merit. Birgit Hans's "Re-Visions: An Early Version of The Surrounded" suggests insight into the process of recovering Indian identity that has become so important a theme in later fiction by American Indian writers. Her examination of an early manuscript version of McNickle's first novel details how a conventional romance was transformed into a naturalistic vision of human limitation and endurance. The Surrounded, like the novels of Zola, concedes little to wishful idealism, yet McNickle himself was like Zola in being an idealist in his own life, working tirelessly in public life on behalf of ideas he believed in. Now examined in relation to McNickle's personal history and contemporary American Indian life, The Surrounded (as well as McNickle's other works) has yet to be studied in the context of American naturalism, as part of a body of work that includes Native Son, Quicksand, Studs Lonigan and the novels of Sinclair Lewis.
        This period up to 1950 offers other works deserving attention. Some authors, like John Joseph Mathews, John Milton Oskison and Ella Deloria, have already been the subjects of articles and dissertations. Others remain unstudied, though they raise tantalizing questions for both the scholar and the ordinary reader. America Needs Indians! is one such text. The book is puzzling through and through. For one thing, the production is, if not extravagant, certainly of high quality. The cloth cover is embossed with a two-color design, half-tones are printed on semi-glossy paper, and the text with its various fonts and illustrations is a veritable sampler of the typesetter's art; moreover, a pocket glued into the back cover contains two copies of an elaborate map in two colors. The text, as Marie Annharte Baker observes in her note, "According to Iktomi," is often biting, often heartrending, satire: the irrepressible word-play anticipates the verbal antics of Gerald Vizenor. Who is or was the pseudonymous "Iktomi"? By what other name was he (or she?) known? The copy before me is inscribed on the end page with the signature "Iktomi witko" and a small drawing. Danky and Hady list IKTOmi as editor of Re-America (Restore America). The annotation in Littlefield and Parins' guide to American Indian periodicals notes the conservation emphasis of Re-America's sponsor, the Association for the Restoration of Real "America" in Miniature; they mention Archie Phinney as author of articles on Indian mythology, and IKTOmi as responsible for articles on Indians in sports. Other identities {9} that Iktomi had remain a mystery, for the moment.
        "Chee's Daughter" by Juanita Platero and Siyowin Miller is another neglected find. This fine short story, although frequently reprinted, has received no critical attention. "Chee's Daughter" was first published in 1948 in Common Ground, and Beidler and Egge note its reprinting in the anthologies edited by Natachee Momaday and by Sanders and Peek; Jane Katz also included it in her collection of writings by American Indian women. Sanders and Peek note in their editorial comments that Juanita Platero is Navajo and Siyowin Miller non-Indian and suggest a long-term collaboration; Momaday mentions other short stories and a novel, The Winds Erase Your Footprints; no sources or other titles are given. No entry for Platero and/or Miller appears in the bibliographies compiled by LaVonne Ruoff, Jack Marken or Arlene Hirschfelder. Even if no further information exists about the authors and their other work, "Chee's Daughter" merits study in its own right.

Egas read the three words on the thin paper and discovered that his daughter had written the note to the trickster. His hands clenched, he shuddered and gathered the other notes on napkins before the trickster returned. Sammie remembered too late to recover the intimate message and the critical words she had written on the napkins.

(Gerald Vizenor, Griever: An American Monkey King in China 191)

It is hard to think of any technology that has more profoundly changed human life than writing has. Expressions like "literacy crisis" depend for their impact on profound belief in the value and necessity for writing. For many current thinkers, the matter is more ambiguous, and Bright reminds us that skepticism as to the value of literacy goes back to Socrates. Writing may liberate and preserve; it may also betray. As Vizenor's evil Egas Zhang understands, writing can make people vulnerable as well as powerful. The ambiguous or even deleterious aspects of writing are a recurrent theme in the works of contemporary American Indian writers--although it must be pointed out that critics of the written word tend to do their critiquing in published writings.
This issue of SAIL was undertaken in the hope that bringing attention to some of these works by pioneering Native American writers would encourage further research in the subject. The editors wish to express their gratitude first of all to the contributors here, for insight, generosity and patience. The process of editing the issue generated interest, and some pieces begun late in the cycle could not be completed in time for this deadline and will be reserved for future issues; we anticipate receiving additional papers on Occom and Eastman in the {10} coming months, and invite submissions at any time on topics related to early written literature by American Indian authors.

WORKS CITED

Beidler, Peter G. and Marion F. Egge. The American Indian in Short Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979.

Bright, William. American Indian Linguistics and Literature. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984.

Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Danky, James P., ed. Hady, Maureen E., comp. Native American Periodicals and Newspapers 1828-1982: Bibliography, Publishing Record, and Holdings. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Dorris, Michael. The Broken Cord. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Foreman, Grant. Sequoyah. Norman and London: U of Oklahoma P, 1938.

Harrison, Eric. "A Girl Called `Lost Bird' Is Finally at Rest." Los An geles Times 13 July 1991: A15.

Hirschfelder, Arlene B. American Indian and Eskimo Authors: A Com prehensive Bibliography. New York: Association on American Indian Affairs, Inc., 1973.

Iktomi. America Needs Indians! Denver: Bradford-Robinson, 1937.

Kaiser, Rudolf. "Chief Seattle's Speech(es): American Origins and Eu ropean Reception." Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Katz, Jane B., ed. I Am the Fire of Time: The Voices of Native American Women. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977.

Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. and James W. Parins, eds. American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals, 1925-1970. New York: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. and James W. Parins. A Biobibliography of Native American Writers, 1772-1924. A Supplement. Native American Bibliography 5. Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1985.

Marken, Jack W. The American Indian: Language and Literature. Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1978.

Mitchell, Lewis. Wapapi Akonutomakonol / The Wampum Records: Wabanaki Traditional Laws. 1897. Ed. Robert M. Leavitt and David A. Francis. Fredericton: Micmac-Maliseet Institute, U of New Brunswick, 1990.
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Momaday, Natachee S., ed. American Indian Authors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

Momaday, N. Scott. The Ancient Child. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Owens, Louis. The Sharpest Sight. Norman: U Oklahoma P, 1992.

Patterson-Rudolph, Carol. Petroglyphs and Pueblo Myths of the Rio Grande. Albuquerque: Avanyu Publishing, 1990.

Paulson, Susan. "Double-talk in the Andes: Ambiguous Discourse as Means of Surviving Contact." Native Latin American Cultures Through Their Discourse. Ed. Ellen B. Basso. Bloomington: Indiana University Folklore Institute, 1990. 51-65.

Rhodes, Joe. "Smits' Tearful `Broken Cord.'" Los Angeles Times TV Times 28 February 1992: 77.

Rodriguez, Richard. "The Head of Joaquin Murrieta." California 10.7 (July 1985): 55-62, 89.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: MLA, 1990.

Sanders, Thomas E. and Walter W. Peek. Literature of the American Indian. Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1973.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Seaver, 1981.

Thompson, Lucy. To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. 1916. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1991.

Vizenor, Gerald. Griever: An American Monkey King in China. New York: Fiction Collective, 1987.

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Illustration 1. Two glyphs from the Dresden Codex.

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A COMPARISON OF ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF A MAYAN TEXT,
THE POPOL VUH
Denise Low

Translation of the Popol Vuh, a lengthy creation cycle, into English presents difficulties of cultural context as well as language. This "Book of the Council" (Recinos 5) was originally hieroglyphic, as deduced from accounts of hieroglyphic Mayan books seen by Fray Diego de Landa from 1549 to 1566 in Guatemala. Also, the surviving alphabetic version of the Popol Vuh has vestiges of pictorial language in its phrasing. But even if the hieroglyphic original were extant, translation would pose problems, since Mayan literacy appears to be radically different from Western notions: "a number of signs are polyvalent, that is a particular sign may have more than one phonetic reading, and it may also he read for its ideographic value" (Coe 182). The glyphs can be visual puns that lend themselves to an improvisational reading, not word-for-word representation.
Hieroglyphs for the planet Venus or the opossum god, for example, are depicted differently in different media--codices, murals, or stone. Sequential drawings of the opossum god in the Dresden Codex [Illustration 1] show variant facial expressions, postures, and secondary glyph parts (Barbara Tedlock). A glyph that denotes a cenote, or sinkhole, is expanded to be a base underneath the opossum god in one depiction, and entirely omitted in another. In contrast, letters of the Roman alphabet, even when drawn by a fine calligrapher, are always denotative; they do not vary in meaning. Mayan script is a blend of denotative, ideographical and syllabic representation. Even Mayan numerals have two forms, like small and capital letters, where one is an abstraction of counting (bars and dots), and the other is a pantheon of faces with connotations that are only partially decoded. In a Newberry Library lecture, Barbara Tedlock noted that even today, more than four hundred years after contact with Europeans, hieroglyphs are only thirty to eighty percent understood, depending on which scholar is consulted. The Mayanist Michael Coe estimates that eighty-five percent can be read (178). In any case, a translation of the lost hieroglyphic Popol Vuh is impossible, and yet the ghost of that version stands behind any attempt to render it into English.

The history of the surviving text of the Popol Vuh makes an interesting narrative in itself. The primary copy comes from the hand of a Dominican priest, Francisco Ximenez (1666-1730), who was in {14-15: 2-page graphic: Illustration 2. Opening page of the manuscript of the Popol Vuh. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.}{16} Guatemala most of his career, and in Chichicastenango from 1701 to 1703, when he collected the text. He also wrote a grammar of three dialects of Mayan in addition to a history of Guatemala. He apparently transcribed the Popol Vuh from a Quiché Mayan manuscript written between 1554 and 1556. Dennis Tedlock (Popol Vuh 28-29) and Adrián Recinos (31-35) give convincing evidence for this date from the manuscript itself. A Mayan owned the manuscript, and Ximenez apparently returned it to the owner.
        Onto handmade paper, and with handmade ink, Ximenez and his scribes copied the story in conventional Spanish and a modified Latin-alphabet version of Quiché. Each page had a left-hand column of Quiché and a right-hand column of Ximenez' Spanish translation [Illustration 2]. The Ximenez manuscript remained in the Dominican library until the 1830s, when it was transferred to the Guatemalan national archives.
        This text was discovered in the San Carlos University library by the German Carl Scherzer, who copied it in 1853 and 1854; he published his copy of Ximenez' Spanish in Vienna in 1857, but it contained many errors because of an inaccurate copyist and printers unfamiliar with Spanish (Recinos 40).
        In 1858 the French Abbé Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg also copied and translated the Ximenez text in Guatemala, possibly two versions. He included a summary written by Ximenez as part of his Historia, and the complete Quiché and Spanish version. Brasseur de Bourbourg published a long Quiché and French text in Paris, Popol Vuh: Le livre sacré et les mythes de l'antiquité americaine (1861) to great acclaim. It aroused in Europe and in the United States an intense interest in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures and civilization (Himelblau 1). Bourbourg's translation was not a work that showed close attention to linguistic accuracy, but it was a "long and elaborated affair which frequently omitted some lines and paraphrased others" (McClear 29). Nonetheless, it was a popular success. For a century many translations were based on Brasseur de Bourbourg's French and Quiché text.
        The Abbé did make some logical divisions of the manuscript into a preamble and four parts, then subdivided these into chapters. Most subsequent versions have followed his scheme, which attests to an inherent structure that appealed to diverse translators. After working on the translation in the Guatemalan national library, Brasseur de Bourbourg spirited the manuscript away to France (Tedlock, Popol Vuh 30). The text left the public view until it was rediscovered at the Newberry Library in Chicago in the l940s.
        The first translations of the Popol Vuh into English were paraphras-{17}es based on Bourbourg's French and Scherzer's publication of Ximenez' Spanish versions (Spence 9). Sir Arthur Helps published a "brief synonsis" in The Spanish Conquest, a four volume work published in London between 1955 and 1961 (Recinos 254). He apparently worked from Karl Scherzer's copy of Ximenez' Spanish text published in Vienna in 1857. From 1905 to 1907 Dr. Kenneth S. Guthrie published a synopsis of the Popol Vuh in an American theosophist magazine, The Word. His source is not clear, and the work is not considered serious scholarship (Spence, Popol Vuh 1). A more reputable version in English was by Lewis Spence in 1908, condensed from Bourbourg's French and Ximenez' Spanish. It appeared as a special publication of the London Folk-lore Society.
        The Spence paraphrase was the only available English translation until the middle part of this century. Then the Newberry Library was the site of good fortune. In 1941 a former Guatemalan ambassador, Adrián Recinos, found a volume entitled Empiezan Las Historias del Origen de Los Indios de esta Provencia de Guatemala, and bound with it was the original Ximenez manuscript of the Popol Vuh. The smaller Popol Vuh section had been overlooked because it was bound within a volume of grammar and history.
        Apparently, when Brasseur de Bourbourg died, the Ximenez manuscript was sold to Alphonse Pinart, whose bookplate is affixed to the inside cover, and somehow Edward Ayer acquired it for his collection (McClear 29). Ayer did not realize what was in the book, and it came to rest with the rest of his collection in the Newberry Library. In 1946 Recinos found the work, and translated the Quiché of the Ximenez manuscript into his native Spanish. Two Americans, first Sylvanus Morley and then Delia Goetz, assisted Recinos in preparing a translation of Recinos' Spanish translation into English, published in 1950. This was the first complete version ever available in English, four hundred years after first contact between Mayans and Europeans.
        In 1971 Munro S. Edmonson published the first Quiché-to-English translation, a versified version. And finally, in 1985 Dennis Tedlock published the second translation from Quiché into English.
        Various adaptations and excerpts have been published by authors such as Kenneth Guthrie and Ralph Nelson, but such publications are derived from earlier complete translations. Nelson has a popularized adaptation of Part I with extensive illustrations. Guthrie created a version to appeal to a specialized audience. His Popol Vuh appeared in The Word, which Recinos describes as "a monthly magazine devoted to philosophy, science, religion, Eastern thought, occultism, theosophy" (248). The Word was probably a religious tract, like some of Guthrie's other publications. Lewis Spence described it in 1930 as "couched in {18} scriptural language, and such treatment assists the vulgar error that the Popol Vuh is merely a native travesty of portions of the Old Testament" (Edmonson, Lore 270). Guthrie's sources are not clear, though he claimed to have worked independently except for adding "some felicitous terms" from another translation by James Pryse, which Guthrie claims was published in a journal entitled Lucifer in 1894 and 1895 (Recinos 59). Guthrie's translation is not commonly available (Edmonson, Lore 27). Pryse's version is also lost. Spence is the only scholar who refers to seeing it (Spence, Popul Vuh 1).
        The scholars who truly translated complete texts of the Popol Vuh into English include only Spence; Recinos, Morley and Goetz; Edmonson; and Tedlock. A comparison of English renditions of the opening section of Part One (after the Prologue) shows the range of approaches to translation in this century.
        Translators reconcile themselves to partial solutions. Allan Burns and Dennis Tedlock draw upon extant Mayan oral tradition as an analogue to the original context. Some documentary records survive of Mayan writings: a few codices now in Dresden, Madrid and Paris (Recinos 10); an alphabetic Quiché Mayan version of the Popol Vuh; alphabetic Mayan (mostly Yucatec) versions of the Chilam Balam; the Rabinal Achi (a theatrical piece); and first-hand accounts of early Spaniards (Fray Diego de Landa, Fray Bernardino Sahagun and others). Translators have worked with clues from the past and the current Mayan culture, but of course no definitive translation is possible of a hieroglyphic, probably orally-based narration.
        However, the original Popol Vuh presents not only a problem of differing times, languages, and alphabets, it represents a sacred worldview quite different from the Judaeo-Christian tradition of most Spanish and English-speaking people. Early translators had a problem seeing the Mayan narrative as a document of a separate religious system. Miguel Leon-Portilla notes the "manifestas interpolaciones de origen cristiano" in the Spanish translation of Recinos, and he goes on to assert the distinctively Mayan context (39-40). Especially, a different concept of deity from monotheism is apparent from the opening. Therefore, earlier translations err by assuming a complete assimilation of Biblical concepts, either consciously (Guthrie) or unconsciously (Spence; Recinos, Goetz and Morley).
        Problems of translation go beyond linguistic equivalence. The idea of literary procedure is different, the cosmology is different, and the remaining people in Guatemala and the Yucatan are different from their ancestors of almost five centuries ago. Contemporary Quiché Mayans have lost the ability to read hieroglyphs. The fact that Spanish-speaking people now live in that area also removes the Popol Vuh from the {19} American-English mainstream of North America. The text is both from "far away and far ago" (Ortiz). Is any kind of valid translation even plausible?
        Jacques Derrida writes about untranslatability and about the impurity of all languages; he believes humankind has been put into a "double bind" since Babel (100-103). Roman Jakobson also agrees that poetic art is untranslatable (232-9), but he offers an option: "Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition--from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition--from one language into another" (239). Writers who translate, or transpose, the Popol Vuh into English produce works that are removed in many ways from the original.
        Further, in producing these new texts, the translators produce information about themselves as much as about the Popol Vuh. Walter Benjamin (and others) have written about the compromises of translation:

The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. . . . It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible . . . . (81)

Benjamin proposes a receptivity to the translated language, in effect a dialogue with the remote culture, with an openness to new invention.
The English versions of the Popol Vuh, whatever the method of translation, are all incomplete in some way, and the lacunae reveal specific discrepancies between the two systems of knowledge. As time passes, the gap between the original Quiché and English widens, causing the need for repeated translation:

Only rarely however does the literary translation attain the stability of an original work (the Schlegel-Tieck translations of Shakespeare are such rarities); it is hardly ever handed down from one generation to another as a work of art in itself, more often it becomes ossified as merely a dated text. In other words, it loses its communicative function as a work of literature within a continually shifting cultural system. This explains why the need so often arises to create new translations of literary works. (Snell-Hornby 112)

The background information about English-language translations of the Popul Vuh and their styles becomes as informative as the foreground of text. Translations need to be read extra-textually, with awareness of {20} the motives of the translators. A complete reading includes the background of the translator's process as well as the final text itself.
Because there are few translations of the Popol Vuh into English, a brief inventory is possible. The priority of each translator as well as the produced text can be evaluated by three characteristics distinguished by Margot Astrov in her discussion of North American Indian verse: "linguistic fidelity," "poetic quality," and "cultural matrix" (6). Astrov's evaluative criteria, though published in 1946, still are contemporary. Recent translation theory emphasizes "the orientation towards cultural rather than linguistic transfer" (Snell-Hornby 43). Publication of English translations of the Popol Vuh began in 1908 (Spence) and the most recent is 1985 (Tedlock). The emphasis of the English translations does become more culturally based.

III

Lewis Spence's London version of 1909 is the first translation commonly available to the English-speaking world. However, it is a paraphrase from the French translation of Ximenez' Spanish translation of Quiché Mayan; it literally is, in Octavio Paz' term, "a translation of a translation of a translation" (9) (though Paz meant that the transfer of nonverbal experience to language conventions to a final text is the three-part translation of writing itself). Either literally or metaphorically, Spence proves Paz' point that "Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention" (9). After a preamble, Spence's text begins:

Over a universe wrapped in the gloom of a dense and primeval night passed the god Hurakan, the mighty wind. He called out "earth," and the solid land appeared. The chief gods took counsel; they were Hurakan, Gucumatz, the serpent covered with green feathers, and Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, the mother and father gods. As a result of their deliberations animals were created. But as yet man was not. (Popol Vuh 9-10)

The whole translation is essentially a plot outline; all of the Popol Vuh is reduced to eighteen pages of a small pamphlet.
        This version of the narrative does not exemplify any of Astrov's three considerations for translation--linguistic accuracy, aesthetic style, or cultural context. Spence himself apologizes in the introductory remarks for the limitations he worked with: "Unfortunately both the Spanish and the French translations leave much to be desired so far as their accuracy is concerned, and they are rendered of little use by reason of the misleading notes which accompany them" (Spence, Popol Vuh 1). Spence cannot give a version that is linguistically accurate, but he does clarify the lineage of his work. He offers no explanatory notes {21} on details of the translation. What cultural framework he attempts is a very general discussion of Mayan gods and North American Indian mythology and poetics.
        This version would make it appear that the Popol Vuh is a simple plot line; the overall literary structure is obliterated by reducing the text to a summary. Spence's vocabulary is formal and Latinate, including terms like "primeval" and "deliberations." The inversion of noun-verb order, as in the phrase "over a universe . . . passed the god Hurukan," lends a formal tone. Two of the five sentences have passive verb constructions: "were Created," and "was not [created]"; these make the tone ceremonial.
        The singular, masculine, and abstract wind god who calls for the creation of this Earth parallels the God of Genesis ("and God said, Let there be Light: and there was light"). Spence lists the Quiché gods, but the process of creation is Biblical. Although a few specific Christian references are clear in the Spanish-era text, the Mesoamerican concept of deity is distinctive; "Theogonic multiplicity results in part from the gods having many aspects. Firstly, each was not only one but four individuals" (Coe 165). Mayan gods can also appear as consorts of the opposite sex. Spence's wind god is an anachronism in the text, appearing as a single male god. Spence does list the names of the four gods in the original Quiché, but this only suggests the complex pantheon of Mayan theology.
        In addition to the paraphrase of the Popol Vuh, Spence includes commentary about the culture of the Mayans. However, like his scholarship on Atlantis (Atlantis in America), much of the background to the Mayan work is speculative. Spence tries to assert a simplified pan-Indianism by comparing creation accounts of Athapascans, Muscokis (sic), Zunis, Iroquois, Mixtecs, and Guaymis; Spence claims the stories of these very different tribes illustrate "the fact of ethnological unity among the American tribes" (Popol Vuh 32). He also assumes the written language is rudimentary, "still in a state of transition from the pictographic to the phonetic-ideographic stage" (Popol Vuh 31). Spence's background information is opinion with few substantiated references.
        Further, Spence imposes English poetics upon the Quiché, despite not knowing the language. He writes that "like most barbarous compositions which depended for their popularity upon the ease with which they could be memorized, the Popol Vuh was originally composed in metre" (Popol Vuh 5). He claims that the first line "almost scans in iambics" (Popol Vuh 5). He presumes that his own English versification system is universal, and he rationalizes any discrepancy as a problem of the Mayan informant: "the native compiler of the Popol {22} Vuh appears to have been unable to recollect the precise rhythm of the whole . . . many passages attest its original odic character" (Popol Vuh 55). Spence's chauvinism makes his work typical of a Victorian translation style which Susan Bassnett-McGuire describes as emphasizing "production of a text of second-rate literary merit for an elite minority" (73).

        The next translation into English, in 1950, was again twice removed from the original Quiché text. The collaboration of Sylvanus Morley and Delia Goetz with Adrián Recinos resulted in a large volume with an introductory essay by Recinos, a brief comment by Morley, the English text (with extensive footnotes), bibliography, index, and a translation of a brief Quiché genealogy, "Paper Concerning the Origin of the Lords." The English was based on Recinos' Spanish translation of 1946. Extensive footnotes discuss Quiché linguistics, Bourbourg's translation for comparison, and some ethnological explanation of Mayan cultural references. The thorough discussion of culture is extra-textual. This translation requires the reader to scan the text at the top of the page with constant interruptions for footnotes; it is more a scholarly study than an aesthetic experience.
        Although Recinos proposes in his introduction that the Popol Vuh is literary, his translation is written in a journalistic style. It is in prose form, like Ximenez' text, with no attention to poetic line. Because Recinos, Morley, and Goetz do not translate the proper names of Quiché deities, footnotes are crucial, and the extensive pantheon in the text becomes cumbersome. Aside from this, the diction is straightforward, but stylistic quality is not a priority. The static verb "to be" carries the meaning of most sentences, so a declamatory quality slows down the narrative. Copulatives such as "there was" and the use of passive voice also make the story less dramatic. Passive voice is true to the Quiché (Recinos 50-51), which gives this translation the advantage of mimicking the original language. But in English this sort of language does not lend a sense of mystery to the moments of creation; "linguistic transfer" (Snell-Hornby 43) is favored over elegant English style.
        The Recinos-Goetz-Morley translation does include some apparently intentional parallelism to reflect the original Quiché poetics. Parallelism also corresponds to Biblical style, and even meaning seems framed in Biblical terms, such as "Then came the word," which is very close to the Gospel of St. John, "In the beginning was the Word." In the opening of this translation of the Popol Vuh, this sentence appears to be the pivot of the narrative; after it, the gods Tepeu and Gucumatz {23} "came together" in the void to discuss creation.
        The work of Recinos, Morley and Goetz shows an interest in scholarly research about the Popol Vuh; the lack of attention to poetic quality indicates that they do not present the work as an artistic creation.

About twenty years later, in 1971, Munro Edmonson did the first English translation directly from Ximenez' Quiché text. Edmonson, a serious linguist, continued on to translate one of the Chilam Balam manuscripts and to publish numerous articles about Mayan language and literature. His linguistic prowess is shown to be conjoined with a conviction that translation is a literary, not just an ethnographic, undertaking: "It is my conviction that the Popol Vuh is primarily a work of literature, and that it cannot be properly read apart from the literary form in which it is expressed" (Popol Vuh xi). He goes on to further justify his position that the work is foremost a valid literature: "It is a treasure of ethnograhic information. But it is first and most surprisingly a coherent literary work, with scope and unity" (Popol Vuh xiii-xiv). His tone is somewhat defensive, or at least it shows his expectation of a challenge, when he states "surprisingly" the Popol Vuh is a "coherent literary work."
Edmonson classifies the narrative in terms of what is familiar to him and his audience; he compares the Popol Vuh to the epic genre of Greek origins:

It would be inappropriate to call the Popol Vuh the epic of the Quiché. Although it belongs to a heroic (or near-heroic) type of literature, it is not the story of a hero: it is (and says it is) the story of a people . . . in the language and concepts available to him, the author has set down everything that "Quiché" means in its full mythic, historic, and ethnic ambiguity, from the origin of the world. (Popol Vuh xiii)

Edmonson sets the Mayan text on a level with Homer, Dante, and Milton, who all present "full mythic, historic" context. He stops short, however, of identifying the serious religious nature of the Popol Vuh. Although he does not present the Mayans as "savages" as Spence does (Popol Vuh 9), neither does he credit their text with a sacred status.
        What Edmonson achieves in his translation is a transformation of the unparagraphed prose from the Ximenez manuscript into a verse form of parallel couplets. Walter Ong notes that such parallelism is a common feature of orally transmitted literature (34-36). Tedlock (Spoken Word 220-27) and Burns argue that the "couplets" of the Popol {24} Vuh are a characteristic feature of Mayan oral literature: "A common feature in Mayan oral literature is the use of parallel construction. Sometimes a sentence or phrase is repeated word for word in a line or two lines" (Burns 28). Recinos, although his translation is prose, still is aware of parallelism in the original syntax, "its frequent repetitions" (xiii). Recinos admits that he sacrifices aesthetics for "the fidelity which must be the translator's guide" (xiii). His decison not to versify is, therefore, a conscious compromise of his translation.
        The first versification of the Popol Vuh was a set of excerpts published in 1969, before Edmonson's translation, by Miguel Leon-Portilla (49-51, 69-91,120). A Nahuatl scholar and student of Angel Maria Garibay K, Leon-Portilla accepted Garibay's idea of difrasismo in Nahuatl verse: "a parallel couplet containing a pair of metaphors that together expresses a single thought" (19, 65-7). Leon-Portilla applied the Nahuatl model of couplets to some selections from the Popol Vuh.
        Edmonson published his translation after Leon-Portilla's experiments with the Popol Vuh. His translation of the complete Popol Vuh emphasizes poetics. Edmonson explains his understanding of semantic couplets or "keying":

The form itself, however, tends to produce a kind of "keying," in which two successive lines may be quite diverse but must share key words which are closely linked in meaning. Many of these are traditional pairs: sun-moon, day-light, deer-bird, black-white. Sometimes the coupling is opaque in English, however clear it may be in Quiché, as in white-laugh. ("White" also means to throw white bone dice; "laugh" also means to play ball.) (Popol Vuh xii)

A look at the Edmonson translation shows that his decision to use poetic lines has advantages and some problems. He accurately represents the "keying," an authenticated Quiché form. However, cultural context is not possible in the verse of short lines, so footnotes are crucial. Quetzal Serpent, Mothers and Fathers, and Heart of Heaven, all deities, are not explained by the text, and few English speakers are familiar with them. The Mayan concept of godliness is quite unlike monotheism. However, extensive footnotes that break up the visually patterned stanzas are more often linguistic comment than cultural explanation. Mayan gods are not described beyond their association with the calendar (Popol Vuh 6). This translation is not easy for beginning students of Mayan culture to follow.
The verse is lean, reminiscent of the work of Robert Creeley. In one passage, lines consist of one word:

{29}
        (Deer),
            Bird,
        Fish,
            Crab,
        Tree,
            Rock,
        Hole,
            Canyon,
        Meadow
            Or forest. (Popol Vuh 9)

This sparse list is hardly poetic in English. When generic terms are combined--"Tree" "Hole" "forest"--the effect is limited. "Hole" is translated as "cave" by Recinos and "hollow" by Tedlock; both words refer more specifically to landscape than does "hole."
The spacing suggests a rhythm, even for these short lines, and throughout, the couplets reinforce a rhythmic, not prose reading of the work. At times the repetition of phrases becomes uninteresting, as in "Truly it was yet quiet/ Truly it was yet stilled./ It was quiet/ Truly it was calm" (8-9). This compares to Recinos, Goetz and Morley: "all was in suspense, all calm, in silence; all motionless, still . . ." (82). Edmonson does sustain the integrity of the semantic couplets, but at times there is an aesthetic cost.
Edmonson's translation is essential to students of the Popol Vuh to show its original verse format with roots in the oral tradition and the Mayan hieroglyphics, which were often written in pairs (Tedlock, Popol Vuh 31). This exercise of "linguistic fidelity" (Astrov), however, presupposes familiarity with culture.

In 1985 Dennis Tedlock published a translation based on fieldwork in Guatemala during the summer of 1975 and all of 1976. His prose rendition attempts to reestablish a link between contemporary Mayan Indians and the Popol Vuh. Tedlock collected Quiché oral texts and studied contemporary oral patterns of discourse. In addition, he trained as a Quiché diviner, or daykeeper, in the indigenous shamanistic tradition. He brings to his translation the concept of "upstreaming" (Fenton 71-85); that is, he uses contemporary culture as a starting point for recovering historic culture. Tedlock uses contemporary field research into Quiché oral tradition to reconstruct the spirit of the hieroglyphic Popol Vuh manuscript.
Cultural authenticity is the guiding principle of Tedlock's translation. He explains his apprenticeship to a daykeeper, and he still returns to Guatemala every 260 days for religious observances. Also, he {26} establishes the divining system as a valid link to the act of reading the Popol Vuh:

Diviners are by profession interpreters of difficult texts. They can even start from a nonverbal sign, such as the crossing of a road by a coyote or the hatching of an egg in a dream, and arrive at a "reading," as we would say. (Popol Vuh 15)

Not only does Tedlock assert that a diviner reads signs in a fashion similar to that of a reader of a book, but also the geographic locale in its entirety becomes a text, an enlarged page upon which objects move like letters. He includes a map that shows Mayan citadels, and mountains and volcanoes where contemporary rites take place. He discusses the importance of geography to ritual in "Walking the World of the Popol Vuh" (69-97).
        Tedlock correlates the epic directly with contemporary oral tradition. He acknowledges Burns in his preface as "the first to reveal that conversation is the root of all Mayan discourse" (Popol Vuh 19). In An Epoch of Miracles, Burns explains how the storytelling mode of Yucatec Mayan discourse requires that two conversational roles be filled: "The person who does the main telling of the story, the narrator, shares the central stage of story performance with a respondent" (19). Burns points out that the Popol Vuh creation scene shows the gods Tepeu and Gucumatz creating the world through a conversation, not through the word of a single god. Tedlock models his translation after the oral conversation-stories that Burns identifies. He explains that his daykeeper-mentor, Andres Xiloj, is the respondent to the text, which is a "three-way dialogue among Andres Xiloj, the Popol Vuh text, and myself" (Popol Vuh 16). An example of Tedlock's modus operandi is an early translation of the Popol Vuh (section XIV), first published in the literary magazine Conjunctions (176-85). He shows an actual dialogue between Xiloj and himself as they study a section of the story.
        The other justification for relying on an oral tradition to supplement a written text is the probability that the original hieroglyphic version of the Popol Vuh was read through a more improvisational performance than a literal reading. Burns describes a contemporary Yucatec scribe who reads aloud from a book during a religious observance: "He elaborated what was written down, and so his verbal expression was much longer than the words contained on the written pages" (72). De Landa gives a sixteenth century account of a ritual reading of hieroglyphic books by a Mayan priest: "The most learned of the priests opened a book, and observed the predictions for that year, declared them to those present, preached to them a little, enjoining the necessary {27} observances" (71). The "declaring" does not seem to be a rote reading of a text. Further, Tedlock sees remnants of the hieroglyphic original in the alphabetic Ximenez manuscript in phrasing that seems to describe pictures, such as "This is the great tree of Seven Macaw, a name" (31). Tedlock proposes that an oral performance is a more authentic approach than a conventional word-for-word reading.
        Tedlock's translation expands the original text to include a compendium of divination, contemporary Mayan ways, and the Popol Vuh text; he exemplifies Jakobson's notion of "creative transposition" (239). On the other hand, his expansion of the original violates one of Hilaire Belloc's six rules for the translator, "the translator should never embellish" (311). He does create a readable narration with no footnotes. Endnotes include linguistic options and background information, but the text can stand on its own. All together the volume includes translator's preface, introduction, maps, photographs, glossary, notes and commentary, and a bibliography. Only an index is omitted. So Tedlock's book is a resource for Mayan studies as well as a translation.
        What is missing? By choosing to use a predominantly prose form, Tedlock presents the work as a story rather than the poem suggested by the structure of the language. Edmonson's versified translation shows an inherent poetic structure corroborated by Leon-Portilla and other scholars. Tedlock does occasionally resort to similar short-lined verse, but "only where the parallelism is both strongly marked and sustained" (Popol Vuh 245). He does not explain his choice of prose, though it is a reversal of his previous publications, especially of Zuni narratives in Finding the Center. In his preface he discloses only that his translation required "multiple trial runs" (Popol Vuh 16).
        The choice to use prose does not compromise the aesthetic quality of the translation. Tedlock is a gifted stylist. The opening of Part I reads well because of his use of verbs such as "murmurs," "ripples," "sighs," and "hums" (Popol Vuh 72). He chose these to be onomatopoetic: "In translating this passage I have chosen quiet sounds that can be expressed as verbs . . ." Popol Vuh 26). Tedlock integrates the use of couplets into the prose style as parallel clauses. He uses commas, not periods or semicolons, between the clauses to show close relationship, and parallel repetitions gain momentum. The recurrence of "only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night" (Popol Vuh 72) builds up to the mysterious emergence of Sovereign Plumed Serpent, "in the water, a glittering light" (Popol Vuh 73). Tedlock adds dialogue among the gods to make his version read more like a story than an archaic religious text.
        The names of the gods are translated into English, so unfamiliar Quiché names do not slow down the narrative. The metaphor "Heart of {28} Sky" for Hurricane suggests multidimensional aspects of a Mayan deity, as does the listing of the three other aspects of Hurricane: "Thunderbolt Hurricane," "Newborn Hurricane," and "Raw Thunderbolt." Such complexity is finessed fluently in English, and the monotheistic concept is sidestepped.
        Tedlock expands the text of the Popol Vuh so that it incorporates cultural associations. All in all, Tedlock epitomizes the current trend of translators to favor "the orientation towards cultural rather than linguistic transfer" (Snell-Hornby 3). Additionally, Tedlock takes advantage of his facility with language, also demonstrated in his recent book of poetry, Days from a Dream Almanac. His may not be a strictly true translation, but Tedlock's version of the Popol Vuh achieves poetic quality.

VII

        In conclusion, the stories behind translations of the Popol Vuh become a summary of Mayan studies. Read sequentially as a chronology, the stories of translation reflect changes in scholarship from 1908 to 1985. The relationship between translator and text begins as a remote observer, Spence, explains Mayan culture in terms of British poetics. In 1985 the observer, Tedlock, immerses himself in the Mayan point of view as much as he can. His translation elevates cultural authenticity over faithful replication of "keying."
        The poetic quality of translation is secondary at first, with Spence's abridged version and then the plain-spoken work of Recinos, Morley and Goetz. Edmonson, using ideas of Garibay K and Leon-Portilla about Nahuatl as well as Mayan poetic structures, creates a modified couplet form for his version. Tedlock's prose translation, less faithful to the original, does show attention to stylistic quality while incorporating some parallelism. Both Edmonson and Tedlock treat the Mayan text as significant literature.
        The Popol Vuh is especially difficult to translate because of the gap between the source language, including cultural context and time lapse, and the target language of contemporary English. This inherent discrepancy makes the priorities of the translators especially transparent. This distance also challenges the translators to stretch the English language to encompass unfamiliar ideas and poetic forms. Their successes, even if partial, contribute new possibilities to readers and writers of English, and the compelling history of the Mayan civilization is made less obscure.

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APPENDIX:
THREE ENGLISH VERSIONS OF THE BEGINNING OF POPOL VUH

Version 1:
     This the account of how all was in suspense, all calm, in silence; all motionless, still, and the expanse of the sky was empty.
     This is the first account, the first narrative. There was neither man, nor animal, birds, fishes, crabs, trees, stones, caves, ravines, grasses, nor forests; there was only the sky.
     The surface of the earth had not appeared. There was only the calm sea and the great expanse of the sky.
     There was nothing brought together, nothing which could make a noise, nor anything which might move, or tremble, or could make noise in the sky.
     There was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed.
     There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Fore-fathers, were in the water surrounded with light. They were hidden under green and blue feathers, and were therefore called Gucumatz. By nature they were great sages and great thinkers. In this manner the sky existed and also the Heart of Heaven, which is the name of God and thus He is called.
     Then came the word. Tepeu and Gucumatz came together in the darkness, in the night, and Tepeu and Gucumatz talked together. They talked then, discussing and deliberating; they agreed, they united their words and their thoughts.
     Then while they meditated, it became clear to them that when dawn would break, man must appear. Then they planned the creation, and the growth of the trees and the thickets and the birth of life and the creation of man. Thus it was arranged in the darkness and in the night by the Heart of Heaven who is called Huracán.
     The first is called Caculhá Huracán. The second is Chipi-Caculhá. The third is Raxa-Caculhá. And these three are the Heart of Heaven.
     Then Tepeu and Gucumatz came together; then they conferred about life and light, what they would do so that there would be light and dawn, who it would be who would provide food and sustenance.
     Thus let it be done! Let the emptiness be filled! Let the water recede and make a void, let the earth appear and become solid; let it be done. Thus they spoke. Let there be light, let there be dawn in the sky and on the earth! There shall be neither glory nor grandeur in our creation and formation until the human being is made, man is formed. So they spoke.

--Sylvanus Morley and Delia Goetz with Adrián Recinos

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Version 2:        II
Here is the description
    Of these things:
Truly it was yet quiet,
    Truly it was yet stilled.
It was quiet.
    Truly it was calm.
Truly it was solitary,
    And it was also still empty, the
womb of heaven.

         III
These are truly then the first words,
    The first utterances.
There was not one person yet,
    One animal,
(Deer,)
    Bird,
Fish,
    Crab,
Tree,
    Rock,
Hole,
    Canyon,
Meadow
    Or forest.
All by itself the sky existed.
    The face of the earth was not yet visible.
All by itself the sea lay dammed,
    And the womb of heaven,
Everything.
    There was nothing whatever
Silenced
    Or at rest.
Each thing was made silent,
    Each thing was made calm,
Was made invisible,
    Was made to rest in heaven.
There was not, then, anything in fact
    That was standing there.
Only the pooled water,
    Only the flat sea.
All by itself it lay dammed.
    There was not, then anything in fact that might have existed.

It was just still.
    It was quiet
In the darkness,
    In the night.
All alone the Former
    And Shaper,
Majesty,
    And Quetzal Serpent,
The Mothers
    And Fathers
Were in the water.
    Brilliant they were then,
And wrapped in quetzal
    And dove feathers.
Thence came the name
    Of Quetzal Serpent.
Great sages they were
    And great thinkers in their
essence,
    For indeed there is Heaven
And there is also the Heart of
    Heaven.
That is the name
    Of the deity, it is said.

IV
So then came his word here.
    It reached
To Majesty
    And Quetzal Serpent
There in the obscurity,
    In the nighttime.
It spoke to Majesty
    And Quetzal Serpent, and they spoke.
Then they thought;
    Then they pondered
Then they found themselves;
    They assembled
Their words,
    Their thoughts.
Then they gave birth--
    Then they heartened themselves--
Then they caused to be created
    And they bore man. {31}
Then they thought about the birth,
    The creation
Of trees
    And shrubs,
And the birth of life
And humanity
    In the obscurity,
In the nighttime
Through him who is the Heart of Heaven,
    I Leg by name.
I Leg Lightning is the first,
    And the second is Dwarf Lightning.
Third then is Green Lightning,
    So that the three of them are the Heart of Heaven.
Then they came to Majesty
    And Quetzal Serpent, and then was the invention
Of light
    And life.
"What if it were planted?
    Then something would brighten--
A supporter,
    A nourisher.
So be it.
    You must decide on it.
There is the water to get rid of,
    To be emptied out,
To create this,
    The earth
And have it surfaced
    And levelled
When it is planted,
    When it is brightened--
Heaven
    And earth.
But there can be no adoration
    Or glorification
Of what we have formed,
    What we have shaped,
Until we have created a human form,
    A human shape," so they said.
So then this the earth was created by them.
    Only their word was the creation of it.
To create the earth, "Earth," they said.

--Munro Edmonson

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Version 3:

This is the account, here it is:
        Now it still ripples, now it still murmurs, ripples. it still sighs, still hums, and it is empty under the sky.
        Here follow the first words, the first eloquence:
        There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, forest. Only the sky alone is there; the face of the earth is not clear. Only the sea alone is pooled under all the sky; there is nothing whatever gathered together. It is at rest; not a single thing stirs. It is held back, kept at rest under the sky.
        Whatever there is that might be is simply not there: only the pooled water, only the calm sea, only it alone is pooled.
        Whatever might be is simply not there: only murmurs, ripples in the dark, in the night. Only the Maker, Modeler alone, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Bearers, Begetters are in the water, a glittering light. They are there, they are enclosed in quetzal feathers, in blue-green.
        Thus the name, "Plumed Serpent." They are great knowers, great thinkers in their very being.
        And of course there is the sky, and there is also the Heart of Sky. This is the name of the god, as it is spoken.
        And then came his word, he came here to the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, here in the blackness, in the early dawn. He spoke with the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, and they talked, then they thought, then they worried. They agreed with each other, they joined their words, their thoughts. Then it was clear, then they reached accord in the light, and then humanity was clear, when they conceived the growth, the generation of trees, of bushes, and the growth of life, of humankind, in the blackness, in the early dawn, all because of the Heart of Sky, named Hurricane. Thunderbolt Hurricane comes first, the second is Newborn Thunderbolt, and the third is Raw Thunderbolt.
        So there were three of them, as Heart of Sky, who came to the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, when the dawn of life was conceived:
        "How should it be sown, how should it dawn? Who is to be the provider, nurturer?"
        "Let it be this way, think about it: this water should be removed, emptied out for the formation of the earth's own plate and platform, then comes the sowing, the dawning of earth. But there will be no high days and no bright praise for our work, our design, until the rise of the human work, the human design," they said.
        And then the earth arose because of them, it was simply their word that brought it forth. For the forming of the earth they said "Earth." It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding. Then the mountains were separated from the water, all at once the great mountains came forth. By their genius alone, by their cutting edge alone they carried out the conception of the mountain-plain whose face grew instant groves of cypress and pine.

--Dennis Tedlock

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WORKS CITED

Astrov, Margot. The Winged Serpent: American Indian Prose and Poetry. 1946. New York: Capricorn Books, l962.

Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. London and New York: Methuen, 1990.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Belloc, Hilaire. "On Translation." Selected Essays by Hilaire Belloc. Ed. John Edward Dineen. Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1936. 281-89.

Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles Etienne. Popol Vuh: Le livre sacré et les mythes de l'antiquité americaine. Paris: 1861.

Burns, Allan. An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya. Austin: U of Texas P, 1983.

Coe, Michael D. The Maya, 4th ed. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1967.

Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.

Edmonson, Munro S., trans. The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala. New Orleans: Tulane U P, 1971.

------. Lore: An Introduction to the Science of Folklore and Literature. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

Fenton, William N. "Fieldwork, Museum Studies, and Ethnohistorical Research." Ethnohistory 13 (1965): 71-85.

Guthrie, Kenneth S., trans. "The Popol Vuh or Book of the Holy Assembly." The Word 4-8 (1905-1907).

Helps, Sir Arthur. The Spanish Conquest. 4 vols. London: 1855-61.

Himelbau, Jack. Quiché Worlds in Creation: The Popol Vuh as a Narrative Work. Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1989.

Jakobson, Roman. "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation." On Translation. Ed. R.A. Brower. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1959.

de Landa, Fr. Diego. Yucatan: Before and After the Conquest. Trans. William Gates. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1978.

Leon-Portilla, Miguel. Literaturas de Mesoamerica. Mexico: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1984.

------. Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1969.

McClear, Margaret. "Popol Vuh: Structure and Meaning." Thesis St. Louis University, 1970.

Nelson, Ralph. Popol Vuh: The Great Mythological Book of the Ancient Maya. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen, 1962.

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Ortiz, Alfonso. "Problems of Translation in Oral Narratives." Lecture. NEH Summer Institute. Newberry Library, Chicago, 22 June 1990.

Paz, Octavio. Traducción: Literatura y Literalidad. Barcelona: Tusquets Editor, 1971.

Recinos, Adrián, Delia Goetz, and Sylvanus G. Morley, trans. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Mayas. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1950.

Sahagun, Fr. Bernardino de. Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España. 3 vols. Mexico: 1829.

Snell-Hornby, Mary. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 1988.

Spence, Lewis. Atlantis in America. London: E. Benn, 1925.

------. An Introduction to Mythology. London: G.G. Harrap, 1921.

------. The Popol Vuh: The Mythic and Heroic Sagas of the Kiches of Central America. London, 1908.

Tedlock, Barbara. "The Nature of Time Among the Highland Maya." Lecture. NEH Summer Institute. Newberry Library, Chicago, 26 June 1990.

Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuñi Indians. New York: Dial, 1972.

------, trans. Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

------. "Reading the Popol Vuh over the Shoulder of a Diviner and Finding Out What's So Funny." Conjunctions 3 (1982): 176-85.

------. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983.

------. "Walking the World of the Popol Vuh." Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 469-97.

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"HONORATISSIMI BENEFACTORES":
NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS AND TWO SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TEXTS IN THE UNIVERSITY TRADITION
Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing-Reichel

Some of the earliest literary texts written in European languages by Native American authors were written in the 17th century by students at Harvard's Indian College.¹ The fact that they were written in Latin and Greek, the languages of University education, as well as their limited accessibility,² probably explains why these pieces have so far received next to no critical attention.³ Two texts by Harvard Indian students have survived. The main purpose of this article is to reprint them together with approximate translations as well as observations on the form, structure, and grammaticality of the texts and their background in literary tradition. In addition, the problem of their authorship will be discussed. Finally, an attempt will be made to position them historically and ideologically within the context of 17th century colonial discourse.
In 1656, some twenty years after its foundation, Harvard College incorporated the first institution of higher education for the aboriginal population in the English colonies. The aim of the "Indian College"⁴ was the education of Indian youths who appeared to be promising proselytes and who could later propagate the gospel as well as European civilization among their tribes. In this the Puritans were following the example of the Spanish colonizers, whose attempts at training Native Americans as teachers and preachers, however, proved more successful. The comparable success of the Spanish (and, to a lesser degree, the French Jesuits) can be attributed to their relative flexibility in regard to their students' needs and wants. They shaped their training accordingly, whereas the Puritans, utterly convinced of the singular rightfulness of their ways and methods, made their Indian students adhere to the same rigid code to which they subjected themselves.⁵ What awaited the student at Harvard becomes apparent from the 1665 code of College Laws:

In the first yeare after admission for four dayes of the weeke all Students shall be exercised in the Study of the Greeke and Hebrew Tongues, onely beginning Logicke in the Morning towardes the latter end of the yeare unlesse the Tutor shall see Cause by reason of their ripenesse in the Languages to read Logicke sooner. Also they shall spend the second yeare in Logicke with the exercise of the former Languages, and the third yeare in the principles of Ethickes and the fourth in metaphisicks and Mathematicks still {36} carrying on their former studies of the weeke for Rhetoricke, Oratory and Divinity.⁶

Descriptions of the College and the number of its students given in the primary and secondary sources vary.⁷ Apparently only a small number of Indian students attended regularly, and few of those lived to tell the tale. The unfamiliar system of education as well as the living conditions and the diet appear to have taken a deadly toll. Of those who did not fall victim to disease, at least two were murdered,⁸ and "only one Indian, Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, class of 1665, completed the four year program."⁹

I. Caleb Cheeshateaumauk: "Honoratissimi Benefactores" (1663)
        Walter Meserve, probably following Drake's Biography and History of the Indians of North America (1834), spells the name of this Indian College graduate "Chaesahteaumuk." Meserve believed that the piece of writing in the archive of the Royal Society, London, was the Indian's "graduation address to his `most honored benefactors,' written and delivered in Latin."¹⁰ The single paragraph on Caleb Cheeshateaumauk¹¹ in Meserve's article served as an unquestioned basis for information for scholars up to the present. To quote just one example, Andrew Wiget writes: "Caleb Chaesahteamuk [sic], a Natick and the first Native American college graduate, was fluent in English, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin when he gave his 1665 Harvard commencement address in the latter tongue."¹²
        Unfortunately, most of this is assumption. In fact, John Winthrop the Younger sent Cheeshateaumauk's "Honoratissimi Benefactores" to Robert Boyle, "together with a similar piece by another American Indian whose Christian name was Joel."¹³
        To Robert Boyle, whose purview embraced both the Royal Society and the Propagation of the Gospel, he forwarded two papers in Latin, warranted the work of two young aboriginals, who had been Hebraically redesignated Joel and Caleb and enrolled at Harvard. Winthrop had been so impressed (as he seldom was by Indians) that he wondered if the Royal Society might not be interested also.¹⁴
        The date and contents of the letter provide two important pieces of information which suggest that "Honoratissimi Benefactores" was not written or even intended as a graduation address. The `Joel' to whom Winthrop refers must have been Joel Hiacoomes or "Iacoomis as he signs himself on a fly-leaf of a Comenius Janua Linguarum."¹⁵ He and Caleb were in the same class, but Joel was killed before his graduation.¹⁶ More conclusive is the date on the letter: according to the {37} Harvard records Caleb graduated in 1665 whereas Winthrop's letter is dated November 3rd, 1663. Not many students write their graduation address two years in advance, and it becomes obvious that in conjunction with Winthrop's letter the text was meant to be an address expressing appreciation and gratitude towards persons like Boyle, who raised and donated funds for the education of the Indian students and were in a very economical sense "Honoratissimi Benefactores."
The manuscript attributed to Cheeshateaumauk¹⁷ reads as follows:

Honoratissimi Benefactores

     Referunt historici de Orpheo musico et insigni Poeta quod ab Appolline Lyram acceperit eaque tantum valuerit, ut illius Cantu sylvas saxumque moverit et Arbores ingentes post se traxerit, ferasque ferocissimas mitiores rediderit imo, quod accepta Lyrâ ad inferos descenderit et Plutonem et Proserpinam suo carmine demulserit, et Eurydicen uxorem ab inferis ad superos evexerit: Hoc symbolum esse statuunt Philosophi Antiquissimi, ut ostendant quod tanta et vis et virtus doctrinae et politioris literaturae ad mutandum Barborum Ingenium: qui sunt tanquam arbores, saxa, et bruta animantia: et eorum quasi matephorisin efficiendam, eosque tanquam Tigres Cicurandos et post se trahendos.
     Deus vos delegit esse patronos nostros, et cum omni sapientiâ intimâque Commiseratione vos ornavit, ut nobis paganis salutiferam opem feratis, qui vitam progeniemque a majoribus nostris ducebamus, tam animo quam corporeque nudi fuimus, et ab omni humanitate alieni fuimus, in deserto huc et illuc variisque erroribus ducti fuim[us].
     O terque quaterque ornatissimi, amantissimique viri, quas quantasque quam maximas, immensasque gratias vobis tribuamus: eo quod omnium rerum Copiam nobis suppetitaveritis propter educationem nostram, et ad sustentationem corporum nostrorum: immensas maximasque expensas effudistis.
     Et praecipuè quas quantasque, Gratias Deo Opt.[imo] M[a]x.[imo] dabimus qui sanctas scripturas nobis revelavit, Dominumque Jesum Christum nobis demonstravit, qui est via veritatis et vitae. Praeter haec omnia, per viscera miserecordiae divinae, aliqua spes relicta sit, ut instrumenta fiamus, ad declarandum et propogandum evangelium Cognatis nostris Conterraneisque: ut illi etiam Deum Cognoscant: et Christum.
     Quamvis non posumus par pari redere vobis, reliquisque Benefactoribus nostris, veruntamen speramus. nos non defuturos apud Deum supplicationibus importunis exorare pro illis pijs miserecordibus viris, qui supersunt in vetere Angliâ, qui pro nobis tantam vim auri, argentique effuderunt ad salutem animarum nostrarum procurandam et pro vobis etiam, qui instrumenta, et quasi aquae ductus fuistis omnia ista beneficentia nobis Conferendi.

Vestre Dignitati devotissimus: Caleb Cheeshateaumauk

{38}
        The Latin text contains several minor grammatical mistakes. Some are spelling errors; e.g. "posumus," "redere," "miserecordibus," "propogandum," "veruntamen," and, repeatedly, "tanquam" instead of possumus, reddere, misericordibus, propagandum, verumtamen, and tamquam. In "Barborum" the second syllable to spell Barbarorum was omitted. A problematic spelling is "Tigres Cicurandos" (obviously not Citurandos as Morison has it), for cicurare is a Latin word very rarely used. The only source that Cheeshateaumauk could have known is Varro, De Lingua Latina, 7, 91. The meaning, however, is the same as in securare, so "Cicurandos," if not from Varro, could be a misspelling (substitution of "c" for "s" can occasionally be found in Puritan texts) or the word was misheard--which would imply that the text was dictated. This could also account for the other spelling mistakes in the text.
        The most puzzling phrase in the manuscript is "quasi matephorisin efficiendam" near the end of the first paragraph. Along with Latin, Greek was part of the curriculum at Harvard, and the author of the text obviously meant to include here a word borrowed from the Greek, probably metamorphosis--which would make sense. Winthrop told Boyle that he "had questioned the Indians in Latin and received good answers in the same language, and heard them both express several sentences in Greek also."¹⁸ If one of the two Indian students actually spoke Greek, it certainly wasn't Cheeshateaumauk. In order to mistake metamorphosis so as to spell something like `metaphorisin' the author cannot have been too familiar with Greek. To use a word and not be able to spell it at all would again indicate that the text may have been dictated rather than composed in written form. This possibility will be considered again later on.
        In English, the text reads approximately as follows:

Most honored benefactors,

     Historians tell about Orpheus the musician and outstanding poet, that he received a lyre from Apollo, and that he was so excellent on it that the forests and the rocks were moved by his song. He made huge trees follow behind him, and indeed rendered the most ferocious beasts tamer. Because of the lyre he accepted, he descended into the nether world, lulled Pluto and Proserpina with his song and led Eurydice, his wife, out of the nether world into the upper world. The ancient philosophers state that this serves as a symbol to show how powerful the force and virtue of education and of refined literature are in the transformation of the barbarians' nature. They are like the trees, the rocks, and the brute beasts, and a substantial change (metamorphosis) has to be effected on them. They have to be secured like tigers and {39} must be induced to follow.
     The Lord delegated you to be our patrons, and he endowed you with all wisdom and intimate compassion, so that you may perform the work of bringing blessing to us pagans, who derive our life and origin from our forebears. We were naked in our souls as well as in our bodies, we were aliens from all humanity, and we were led around in the desert by various errors.
     Oh threefold and fourfold most illustrious and most loving men, what kind of thanks, if not the greatest and most immense, should we give to you, for that you have supported us with an abundance of all things for our education and for the sustenance of our bodies. You have poured forth immense, the greatest, resources.
     And we will especially give great thanks to God the most excellent and highest, who has revealed the sacred scriptures to us, and who has shown to us our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the way of truth and of life. Besides all this, another hope has been left us through the depths of divine mercy: that we may be instruments to spread and propagate the gospel among our kin and neighbours, so that they also may know the Lord and Christ.
     Even though we can not commensurately reciprocate your kindness and that of our other benefactors, we do hope, however. We are not left alone praying before the Lord with importunate supplications for those pious and merciful men who are still in the old England, who disbursed so much gold and silver for us to obtain the salvation of our souls, and for you as well, who were instruments like aquaeducts in bestowing all these benefits on us.

Most devoted to your dignity: Caleb Cheeshateaumauk

The five paragraphs of the letter can be roughly divided into two parts. The first part compares certain aspects of the Orpheus myth to the present situation of the students; the second part, following up this demonstration of learnedness, is an expression of gratitude to the benefactors combined with a tribute of thanks to the Lord and Christ. The use of the Orpheus myth is of particular interest both for its function as a documentation of scholastic achievements and for the way in which a classical myth was coopted to the needs of the author. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, respectively, Orpheus had been interpreted as the unhappy lover and as a bringer of humanism. The Orpheus figure in this text accesses an older tradition; the figure combines the classical position in which Orpheus acts as a bringer of civilization with the typical early Christian topos in which Orpheus plays the similar role of priest and harbinger of Christianity.¹⁹ Logically enough, this Christian interpretation specifically omits the loss of Eurydice and the final failure of Orpheus' rescue attempt, and {40} concentrates on the poet's ability to transform the spirits of nature and its inhabitants. The analogies the author draws are obvious: the teachers and, for the purpose of this letter, the financial donors like Boyle are likened to Orpheus; their efforts and missionary work to the lyre; and, lastly, the wildness of the stones, forests and animals to the savageness of nature's human inhabitants, among which were the Indian students themselves. This analogy between Indian students and "bruta animantia" is not, as it may initially appear, a Puritan device comparable to Cotton Mather's dictum about an Indian who warned his tribesmen against attacking the colony: "Thus was the tongue of a dog made useful to a feeble and sickly Lazarus."²⁰ Within the text of "Honoratissimi Benefactores," "Philosophi Antiquissimi" are given as a source of this interpretation. More probably the author drew from the so-called Fathers, notably Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius: Clement was t