I just saw (and immediately bought) a book that could have been published expressly for me… and, I suspect, for certain other frequenters of Languagehat, which is why I’m mentioning it here. NYU Press has published an amazing book called The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature
I’ll close with an excerpt from György Gyékényesi‘s “Occidental Cantata”:
Bartókot láttam
amint rigódalt jegyzett
a Carolinákban
sej rigómadár ne szállj fel a fára
s New Orleans-i ütemre rándult a keze
hey
hey
the saints go marchin’ in
hey
hey
the saints go marchin’ out
míg hömpölygött a Mississippi
Oooooooh. 🙂
In the process of fixing dead links (thank goodness for Wikipedia), I discovered that the authenticity of the Walam Olum is in serious doubt: “Ethnographic studies in the 1980s and analysis in the 1990s of Rafinesque’s manuscripts have produced significant evidence that the document is a hoax.” Sad.
Also, I couldn’t stand the fact that Naomi’s Baraita link now goes to a link farm, so I changed it to an archived one (thank goodness for the Wayback Machine).
The beginning of the Walam Olum (the part prior to the flood narrative—thus the part that is not conflict with other Lenape beliefs about how long they had resided in the Delaware region) was the first work in my high school American Literature textbook. (I would have liked to provide a link, but it is surprisingly difficult to locate online references to high school textbook editions published before the World-Wide Web.) I remember my feeling that the English explanations assigned to each of the images seemed questionable—as if the texts had been composed not on the basis of an authentic legend, but by looking at the images and trying to guess what they meant. At least two things contributed to this impression. First, the order of the pictographs seemed skewed. In some places, it looked like there were natural groupings of pictographs, but these were sometimes broken up, so as to make the textual explanations flow better. Second, in a couple places the explanations seemed to be grasping at very minor similarities between widely separated images, and trying to tie them together in a fashion that seemed quite dubious to me.
At the time, I thought were several possible explanations for whatever discrepancies I hazily perceived. The creation tale might have authentically coexisted with the images, but the conceit that each picture expressed a very specific episode from the story, with a standardized wording in the original Lenape, could have been a fiction. Alternatively, the explanations might have been created out of whole cloth, as way to explain an otherwise mysterious set of images; in this case, the composition of the verses might have been either in Lenape or English. However, it did not really occur to me that the pictographs themselves might have been entirely invented, although that now seems to be the most likely explanation of the whole document.
Ooh. In late October I was at a conference in the US. Naturally, there were Hungarians on the plane. They were talking about Florida, and something was Szaraszotában.
Szaraszotában
I once saw a nineteenth-century textbook of English, published for Czech speakers in the American Great Plains (think New World Symphony), whose place of publication was V OMAZE.