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sophia_sol) wrote2020-04-02 09:16 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2020-04-02 09:16 pm
3 folktale collections - Mayan, Ojibway, American loggers
More books from the folktale haul of earlier this year!
The Bird Who Cleans The World And Other Mayan Fables, by Victor Montejo
This one is, as should be obvious from the title, Mayan. The author grew up in a Mayan village with his mother and other elders in the community telling these and other stories, and eventually when he was older he wrote them down so that these stories from his heritage wouldn't be lost. And a fair number of the stories definitely seemed to be to be the sort of story a parent would tell a child. Especially the one about how important it is to honour your mother for all the hard work she did raising you! :P The other story I found particularly interesting was the one with the personification of Death, as Death is gendered female, which isn't something I recall having seen much before.
The Adventures of Nanabush: Ojibway Indian Stories, by Emerson Coatsworth and David Coatsworth
I like that this collection of folk stories actually provides named credit to all the people who told the stories, not just to the compilers. And it's a fun collection to read -- getting a bunch of stories about a single character all together means you get a better sense of that character. Nanabush is something of a trickster, and sometimes he ends the story successful and sometimes not, but something I appreciate about him is that when he faces consequences as a result of a foolish thing he did, he's often like, okay yeah fair I deserved that.
Paul Bunyan, by Esther Shephard
A book of tall tales told by loggers in the 19th and early 20th century in North America - collected and published in the 1920's, a time when the stories were still alive and being told in logging camps, though to some degree on their way out. This author lists many of her sources, the people who told these stories to her. Something I love about what the author's done with collecting these stories is that she's kept in a lot of the talk that might be extraneous to the main thrust of the story but is clearly relevant to the way these kinds of stories were told, which really helps to bring this folk tradition to life for the reader. The point of a folk story doesn't have to be just what the story is, the tangential stuff a storyteller says while introducing the story or interrupting the story can be relevant and interesting too, as is the fact of it being an informal-enough type of storytelling that that's common. (The author is clearly cutting out the swears, though.) (Also, she mentions in the intro that she hasn't included stories that are too closely interested in extremely local details about regions, or insider knowledge about logging, and I for one am disappointed.)
The Bird Who Cleans The World And Other Mayan Fables, by Victor Montejo
This one is, as should be obvious from the title, Mayan. The author grew up in a Mayan village with his mother and other elders in the community telling these and other stories, and eventually when he was older he wrote them down so that these stories from his heritage wouldn't be lost. And a fair number of the stories definitely seemed to be to be the sort of story a parent would tell a child. Especially the one about how important it is to honour your mother for all the hard work she did raising you! :P The other story I found particularly interesting was the one with the personification of Death, as Death is gendered female, which isn't something I recall having seen much before.
The Adventures of Nanabush: Ojibway Indian Stories, by Emerson Coatsworth and David Coatsworth
I like that this collection of folk stories actually provides named credit to all the people who told the stories, not just to the compilers. And it's a fun collection to read -- getting a bunch of stories about a single character all together means you get a better sense of that character. Nanabush is something of a trickster, and sometimes he ends the story successful and sometimes not, but something I appreciate about him is that when he faces consequences as a result of a foolish thing he did, he's often like, okay yeah fair I deserved that.
Paul Bunyan, by Esther Shephard
A book of tall tales told by loggers in the 19th and early 20th century in North America - collected and published in the 1920's, a time when the stories were still alive and being told in logging camps, though to some degree on their way out. This author lists many of her sources, the people who told these stories to her. Something I love about what the author's done with collecting these stories is that she's kept in a lot of the talk that might be extraneous to the main thrust of the story but is clearly relevant to the way these kinds of stories were told, which really helps to bring this folk tradition to life for the reader. The point of a folk story doesn't have to be just what the story is, the tangential stuff a storyteller says while introducing the story or interrupting the story can be relevant and interesting too, as is the fact of it being an informal-enough type of storytelling that that's common. (The author is clearly cutting out the swears, though.) (Also, she mentions in the intro that she hasn't included stories that are too closely interested in extremely local details about regions, or insider knowledge about logging, and I for one am disappointed.)
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Have you ever read the Popol Vuh itself? The one that survived in codex form is of course Quiché, rather than pan-Mayan, but it's just so cool to experience, and if you're also interested in translation stuff, boy is there fascinating translation debate around this.
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This transcribed manuscript was "found" in the 18th century by a Dominican priest, Fr. Ximénez. He translated it into Spanish and collected it in his own writings, which remained in the country after the expulsion of clerics from the territory, and at this point the "original" disappears. It is possible he destroyed it or it was simply lost to time. Layer number three! This transcribed manuscript translation is thus the oldest source anyone has for the "real" text of the Popol Vuh. There is a ton of debate about what Ximénez might or might not have changed -- some people (rather naively, I think) argue that the story is too different from Christianity to have been adulterated by a Catholic priest, others say that it's not like this guy was a de las Casas and it's more than likely that he changed certain parts, still others say that translation from Quiche to Spanish was enough of an adulteration that nothing sure can be said about it at all. What is definitely true is that Ximénez' document includes both Spanish and Nahuatl words and influence, and that there were likely more documents there than Ximénez translated.
This translation molders away for about a hundred years in the Universidad de San Carlos before being rediscovered by a couple of German anthropologists in the mid-1800s. They make a copy and publish it in Europe, where it makes zero impression. Soon after, a French church official, Brasseur, finds Ximénez' documents and, in keeping with his churchy tendencies, steals it and takes it back to France, where it goes from hand to private hand and is essentially forgotten in the archives of a private collection in Chicago, of all places, by the early 1900s. It isn't found properly again until the 1940s by Adrián Recinos, the famous Mayanist.
Regarding English translations, I recommend both Dennis Tedlock's version and Munro S. Edmonson's. Tedlock actually speaks modern Quiché and made his translation with the aid of modern Mayan speakers and storytellers to supplement Ximénez' Spanish. Now, modern Mayans and modern Maya are far removed from this immediately post-conquest document, but this speaks of both good intentions and a certain degree of literalness in the translation. Edmonson's translation is sort of the inverse; he leant heavily on Brasseur's French translation as well as Ximénez' document, and it most interested in preserving the poetic nature of the text. His translation, for example, retains the structure of the "original," semantic couplets. So, the two are very different from each other and from Ximénez' text, and reading them together provides insight that just one translation wouldn't give.
Lots of the stories, characters, and symbols that appear in the Popol Vuh are preserved, transformed, in modern Quiché and other Maya religion, myths, and stories. I bet it would be doubly interesting to read it after having read more contemporary versions in the Montejo text.
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