巴莫曲布嫫

JFR Book Review


The Mohave Heroic Epic of Inyo-kutavêre
(FF Communications 269)

By Arthur T. Hatto. 1999. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica/Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. 269 pages. ISBN: 9083951416 (soft cover).
Reviewed by Aaron Tate, Cornell University
[Review length: 743 words • Review posted in 2004]

Arthur Hatto’s volume for the Finnish Folklore Fellows Communications series is a study of a Mohave epic narrative transcribed during performance in 1902 but largely forgotten by the scholarly world thereafter. Hatto’s study is 162 pages long, and it includes six appendices and a bibliography. The work is of interest not only for the attention it gives to a neglected work of Native American verbal art, but also for its explicit adoption of ethnopoetics as the methodology for retrieval and interpretation. Readers should realize, however, that Hatto’s volume does not include the text of the narrative itself, the only version of which was published by Alfred Kroeber in 1952 (see University of California Anthropological Records 11/1-4:71–149).

A number of peculiarities surround the poem’s transcription. The language of the original transcription was not Mohave, but English. Kroeber got the epic from Inyo-kutavêre, who was one of the last of the Mohave who still knew it. The narrator told the poem in Mohave, Kroeber’s guide and interpreter Jack Jones translated it into English, and Kroeber wrote down Jones’s version during narration. The following quote from Kroeber, which Hatto has provided for clarity, is essential for understanding the poem’s textual situation:

In our recording, Jack Jones allowed the old man to proceed—for perhaps five to ten minutes—until the interpreter had as much as he could remember, then Englished it to me. With omission of repetitions, condensation of verbiage, and some abbreviating of words, I nearly kept up writing in longhand. If Jack got too far ahead, I signaled him to wait. On the other hand, if names of new places or persons came too thickly, Jack would stop translating and ask Inyo-kutavêre to repeat the names slowly, directly to me. (31, quoting Kroeber; emphasis mine)

In the fifty intervening years between transcription and publication, Kroeber improved his understanding of the Mohave language and myth, and Hatto tells us he also devoted a good deal of time to thinking about the poem in light of both Homeric poetry and the Sanskrit Mahabharata. Hatto therefore discusses various features of the Mohave epic in light of his own notion of ‘heroic’ poetry. Much labor is in fact devoted to proving that the Mohave epic is a poem in the heroic style, as defined by Hatto.

As for the context of the poem’s narration, Kroeber, in his edition, provided interesting, though still somewhat scarce, details concerning the genre of the poem and its performance. The epic was not sung, he wrote, but was narrated “without trace of metrical or other formally stylized language, except to a very slight degree in the names of personages” (31, quoting Kroeber). Hatto is less willing to accept such a characterization, and by adopting ethnopoetic procedures of reading is able to tease out a number of formal features passed over by Kroeber (30–39).

However, Kroeber was apparently familiar enough with the performance genres of the Mohave to determine the semantic contents of the songs in relation to themes handled separately in prose narratives. We read that “[a]ll the cycles have their songs, strung on a thread of myth, of which the singer is conscious, although practically nothing of the story appears in the brief, stylistically chosen, and distorted words of the songs” (32). The linguistic idiom of the narration was specialized, as any linguist of folk poetry would today expect. Hatto calls the idiom “oratorical diction”; Kroeber termed it “ejaculatory oratory” of the kind used in “funerary commemoration for brave men”; Mohave who spoke English called it “preaching” (31).

In the main, the rest of Hatto’s book discusses the Mohave “heroic ethos,” leading characters, chiefs and tribal leaders, tribal divisions, foodways, and plot motifs. Hatto provides a useful synopsis of the poem (16-21), which gives the reader a sense of the epic’s narrative structure. Appendices cover notable topics such as nose-pendants, scalping, stone knives, and other themes mentioned repeatedly in the poem.
Readers of Hatto’s book will be interested to know that only one review of Kroeber’s edition was written in the twentieth century (a 1952 notice by H.G. Fathauer in American Anthropologist), while the first comparatavist to mention the work (E.M. Meletinskij) in a scholarly context did so in 1963, in Russian. The lack of scholarly attention helps explain why Hatto, at an advanced age, lavished such care and attention on a text and tradition outside his usual areas of expertise, which are Germanic philology and Central Asian, especially Turkic, oral epic poetry.



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