Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/206

 6i8 Non-English Writings II Almost all personal songs are of this stenographic character so far as they are concerned with mere words. It is even possible to dispense with words altogether, but the translator will go astray who contents himself with the words and does not put into his work the rhythm pattern and the emotion of the melodic intervals. Music is to the highest degree literary with the aboriginal. Even with these aids the meaning of Amerind verse is obscure unless one understands that the genius of the language is holophrastic. This is to say, there is an effort to express the relationship of several ideas by combining them into one word. In the Quicha tongue it is possible to say in a single word, "the-essence-of-being-as-existent-in-humanity." There is a Chippewa word, which means "I-laugh-in-my-thoughts," and an Algonkin word which an unliterary translator might render correctly as dawn, actually means "hither-whiteness-comes- walking. " Another difficulty encountered by the student of aboriginal American verse who is not also a student of aboriginals is the relationship of ideas. When the Paiute Ghost dancer sings The cottonwoods are growing tall. They are growing tall and green, or the Ojibway, All night on the river I keep awake, the first is not describing the spring landscape, but a vision of spiritual regeneration and resurrection from the dead. Nor has the latter lost his sweetheart : he speaks of the search of the soul for mystic completion. As tribal culture advances, the stanza form makes, its ap- pearance, assonance, measure, and in descriptive passages an instinctive attempt to make the rhythms suggestive if not actually imitative. Two or three distinct stanza forms with refrain can be found in the songs of the house-dwelling tribes of the South-west. Garcilasso de la Vega says that the Incas were proficient in the quatrain in which the first line rhymed with the last and the second with the third. Among our own tribes a very competent