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Te Ao Hou, December 1966, Page 63

enthusiasm and industry. These little books are translations, or rather adaptations, of the traditional fairy tales, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding-Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk. There is undoubtedly a need for supplementary reading material in Maori for children, but translated material can never take the place of good, original writing by a native speaker, even when the translator is a master of Maori idiom. English traditional fairy tales would be better left to their proper function of opening the doors to English literature for our children. The author has achieved a fair competence in Maori, but has a long way to go and a great deal yet to learn before he is ready for the task he has undertaken in this series. The Maori he writes is, for native speakers, ludicrous and for learners, dangerous. There are too many serious errors in construction—misuse of verb tenses, words used in quite the wrong sense, too many obsolete words and expressions, and all the other evidence of a too superficial knowledge of a language too quickly gained. Perhaps Mr Stinchcombe's undoubted scholastic ability has been his downfall here. The major disaster area, however, is in the field of idiom, particularly the unfortunate attempts to translate English idiom directly into Maori, with such results as ‘… ka kanikani tana ngakau i te koa.’ … his heart danced for joy. The Maori titles given to the stories are Hine-Urukehu (Goldilocks), Ko Potae-Whero raua ko te Wuruhi (Little Red Riding-Hood) and Ko Tamahae me te Rakau Pini (Jack and the Beanstalk). I must confess to feeling rather incensed at the author's temerity in taking the name ‘Tamahae’ for ‘Jack’, in the Beanstalk story. From, I imagine, a misguided belief that because the stories were being translated into Maori, they should have some Maori flavouring added, the author has given us some incongruous