Ofo, Choctaw, & Rhymes

[Justin McBride]

This is completely unrelated to Siouan linguistics, but I figured I'd share it with you anyhow.

In a strange turn of Jungian synchronicity, most of the big Siouan List topics this week seem to me to center around an old professor of mine from the University of Oklahoma.  Geary Hobson, who wrote the novella "The Last Ofos", also wrote the foreword to an R. A. Lafferty book called "Okla Hannali" about a fictional Choctaw character.  Now, I know only two or three Choctaws, so this book was really the first introduction I ever had to anything like unto Choctaw culture.  Nowadays I always think of this book and subsequently Professor Hobson whenever I think of the Choctaws.  Furthermore, for one of his Native American Literature classes back in the day, I had to read from a book called "The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indian," wherein traditional Native songs, counts, recitations, and stories were translated into English (often from another intercessory European language), and arranged in verse form.  If I recall correctly, some of these "poems" were even made to rhyme in English.  I remember him talking in class about how such literary devices are less than universal, and how our seemingly fundamental notion of rhyming is absent in some if not all the Native languages that he knew of.  This is of course no earth-shattering revelation, but I'd never really considered it before, and so it stuck with me.  Oh, and Professor Hobson was a Quapaw, so he coincidentally hails from Siouan stock.

I'll leave you with a silly memory from the same time.  One old Native song in this poetry book had been translated first into a Scandinavian language, where it had obviously been embellished with some Nordic imagery.  This song must have been discovered during the compilation process, translated into English, and then arranged to look more familiar to the book's anglophonic readers.  It was such a strange thing for me to read a very modern looking song about fjords, skiffs, and the sea-faring life attributed a Native from a Northeast Woodlands culture!

-jtm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/siouan/attachments/20041202/4f0b71e8/attachment.htm>