Ethnopoetics

Narrative Verse

One important early development in this field was the recognition of narrative verse patterning—the idea [Page 297]that Native American oral performances were organized by poetic line phrasings rather than by the sentence/paragraph forms imposed on them by Western transcribers. Pointing out that ethnopoetics is, above all else, committed to understanding the ways in which narrators choose and group words, Dell Hymes asserted in the process that the stories of Native American oral discourse are a form of poetry to be said and heard in lines—an idea he first had in 1960 while working on some of his Northwest Coast materials. Tedlock concluded much the same thing in his influential study of Zuni oral performances in 1972. He and Hymes disagree in part on how to identify the lines themselves, what is actually lost through dictated texts (e.g., not necessarily all paralinguistic features), and what might be saved through phonetically transcribed texts or, perhaps best of all, sound recordings of actual performances. Focusing on the body of the presentation itself (what is said and how it “sounds”), Tedlock puts a great deal of emphasis on the timings of sounds and silences in performances. Hymes says that identifying pauses as line breaks is not available for all narratives. He seeks poetic line identification primarily by identifying recurrent particle patterns in narrative structures. Nonetheless, both of them find empowering knowledge in treating oral narratives as dramatic poetry, thereby marking many translations as distortions of the originals forced by the dictation process, defeating the idea that form and content are independent, erasing presumptions of fixed boundaries between poetry and prose, and applauding new techniques of recording together with a sense of oral art as performance “events.” With this innovative thinking at hand, knowledge of Native American oral traditions has been greatly enhanced by the work of both scholars.

Dialogics

It is important to remember the dialogic character of all such communications and to keep in mind Mikhail Bakhtin's wisdom that language never moves through uncluttered space. Discourse is heteroglossic and mutually constructive in all utterances—in all contexts of development, reception, and discovery—and context is practically everything for determining meaning. Translation (with its attendant nuanced, cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, and mechanical problems) escapes none of this as an activity. In fact, it helps to bring the role of the observer to the fore more readily than in most other domains of ethnographic research. Ethnopoets want their work to be faithful to the grammatical and semantic patterns, styles, figurative speech and imagery, acoustics, rhythms, and associated paralanguage (including pausing and intonations) of original performances. But they must also see themselves as part of the cross-cultural equation. They know that they are an audience of a different kind. They are imposers and interpreters potentially loaded with distorting subjectivities, favoritisms, biases, inclinations, and cultural presuppositions about the nature of the world and their place in it. Moreover, because performance narratives are bound to be multivocal and polyvalent at one level or another, they are always subject to context-sensitive interpretations that cannot always be determined for the original performers in the case of representations or rereadings. The very action of revisiting and reimagining such circumstances creates original material and, thus, another potential source of distortion in the effort to render authenticity.

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