POETRY OF THE MAORI

Te Ao Hou, March 1961, Page 31

POETRY OF THE MAORI by BARRY MITCALFE Mr Mitcalfe, a New Zealand writer of growing reputation, is a teacher at Kaitaia College. In the last few years. he has learned Maori and made some excellent translations of Maori verse. Here are some of them. The Missionary, generally a conventional middle-class Victorian, found the Polynesian, as often as not, in a state of naked splendour. Sex in the South Seas was still a natural act, not yet an obsession. But the tapu-haunted mind of the missionary found such nakedness profane and clothed it in the “Mother Hubbard”—never had the mote in the eye of the beholderachieved such size and shapelessness. Polynesian bodies, once dried by the wind and the sun, now mouldered in Victorian damp. Consumption wore clothes—but so long as consumption wore clothes, it did not matter. In the same way with Maori poetry, the aim was not to preserve the body but to clothe it decently. As the Maori poet personified nature and invariably used the physical image for the abstract thought, the Victorian method of translation was to avert the eyes and tiptoe delicately around the original. But to give the first-comers credit, they translated true to their own light and preserved much that might otherwise be lost entirely. The fact of the matter is that one can no more translate, say, the Maori haka or ngeri1 Song of derision. into drawing-room English than transcribe Lady Chatterley's Lover into Bible-class tract. Such notable Maori scholars as Elsdon Best and Percy Smith, recognising this difficulty, often merely recorded the Maori form, and let it go at that. There was another way for the poet, or for the scholar without poetic pretensions, to evade the “gross image and coarse inference”2 Dr E. Dieffenbach: “Maori Culture in New Zealand,” 1886. of the Maori, and that was to go to the probable source of the poem, to the historical setting and there to recreate the Maori original in conventional and acceptable English. This type of historical reconstruction had its uses, in the same way as a study of say, Chaucer's life helps in the understanding of his work. But to attempt a rewriting of Chaucer from our limited knowledge of his circumstances would be presumptuous to say the least. Yet Maori poetry has suffered such liberties that much of the original growth has been encysted in dead tissue, or cut completely out, as if it were a cancer. Yet the spirit and style of the Maori original—vivid, direct and simple—is more closely tuned to the modern ear than the misty romanticism of their Victorian and post-Victorian translators. Naturally, with the curtains down, some misconceptions about Maori poetry have arisen. It has been argued that the Maori cannot think abstractly, possibly because he had only natural and personal phenomena from which to draw his metaphor and lacked the rich artifactual sources of imagery available to the modern poet. The Maori therefore adapted the physical image in nature to a wide range of uses. Both Maori poetry and religion endowed natural objects with life, and personalizing the inhuman, came to grips with death and the inanimate. This thought involved a high degree of abstraction: the very use of image implies abstraction. It has been stated, furthermore, that the poetry and song of the Maori leans so heavily on historical allusion that it becomes almost meaningless in translation. Although this might be true of a few karakia or chants, it would be fairer to say that it is the average Maori translator who has rested so heavily on the historical source that he makes the poem almost incomprehensible. These few translations are intended simply to introduce the cultural achievements of the ancient Maori to an audience more aware of Milton, Pope and Wordsworth than af Matangi-Hauroa, (Continued on page 34)

DUEL ON THE ROCK by MERETIANA REIHANA—Winner of Te Ao Hou Art Competition 1960

DUEL ON THE ROCK by MERETIANA REIHANA—Winner of Te Ao Hou Art Competition 1960

(Continued from page 31) Puhiwahine and Turaukawa. Yet both translations belong in this country. Although Maori waiata (and carving) represent the highest evolution of Polynesian art, we have chosen to build almost entirely on one culture, as if the Maori had nothing to offer. For the Maori generally, the result has been the loss of his own traditions, good and bad alike, a loss that European culture has not yet made good. For the European, the loss has been in terms of wisdom and understanding. For instance, there is much in Maori waiata that has value as poetry, regardless of race or language. It is significant that the few waiata worth translating that come directly from living sources are from the three great centres of culture, where European techniques and Maori traditions have been integrated through the personality of past leaders: I refer to Parihaka, based on Te Whiti's doctrines of a Maori, Christian communal life; to the Waikato, where the King movement integrates Maori tradition and European political organizations; to Ngati-Porou and Rongo-Whakata, of the East Coast, where Ngata first gave the Maori communal idea a form and framework in co-operative farming schemes. I regret I can make no mention of Ratana. It is a movement of more recent origin, looking toward the future rather than the Maori past and working through pakeha religious and political forms. Most of the waiata have been published before, at least in the original Maori. I feel that work of great value can still be done, not so much in original research, as in sifting through the somewhat disordered middens of earlier research works in the Maori field.