Toward An Oral Poetics

Toward an Oral Poetics
Author(s): Dennis Tedlock

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 3, Oral Cultures and Oral Performances (Spring,
1977), pp. 507-519
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468297
Accessed: 06-10-2019 23:52 UTC
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Toward an Oral Poetics
Dennis Tedlock
WE SHALLingNEVER DEVELOP an effective oral poetics if we begin by read-

Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey come to us already written
down, edited, and recopied an unknown number of times. They
belong to an era, stretching right up through the Middle Ages, when large
quantities of written literature were memorized and recited aloud. Some of
this literature escaped into folk tradition, as bits and pieces of literature
always do. The Yugoslav guslar may well be, in effect, a sort of distant,
humbled descendant of the ancient upper-class Athenian schoolchild (de-
scribed by Eric Havelock) who was taught to recite a written Homer but not
to read it. If so, the guslar has elevated verse epic to an oral art it may not
have been when it started: he is no memorizer, but is instead able to com-
pose on his feet.
To memorize a story is not the same as to remember it. A metrical
framework fitted out with matching formulas may facilitate memorization,
as Havelock suggests, but it does not follow from this that the preliterate
cultures of the eastern Mediterranean (or anywhere else) were heavily in-
vested in metrical expression. There may be verse epics in semiliterate cul-
tures, whether ancient Greek or modern Yugoslavian, but when we turn to
what Walter Ong calls "primary oral cultures," the verse epic does not exist.
The quasi-metrical patterns suggested by West African riddles and some
North American Indian song texts are never sustained for more than two or
three lines. There are sung epics in non-Islamic Africa, but their texts are not
metrical.' If we turn back to the ancient written records, we find that the
oldest known literary documents are Sumerian tablets antedating the earliest
Greek writing by a thousand years, and they are not metrical.2 Claims that
Homeric and Vedic verse forms come straight out of a nonliterate past rest
largely on Classical and Brahmanical tradition, and are to be taken in the
same light as the genealogical lore of royal families.
For the most part, the narrators in primary oral cultures do not sing stories
but speak them. They do not memorize stories, but remember them. They are
not talking digital computers, programmed to retrieve stored formulas in the
right order. The digital computer lacks what we call in English the mind's eye:
a good narrator sees his story, and such ready-made phrases as he may use
are not "the substance of his thought" but an aid in the rapid verbal expres-
sion of that thought, not the internal equivalent of a written text but a bag of
tricks.3 Even taken by themselves, these ready-made phrases are highly vari-
508 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
able: their wording is free fr

upon all the powers of the h
one place and now in another
imitate another person's voic
or surprised, serious or sarca
have been expected.4 The sun
conventional written text do
We shall never develop an ef

texts taken down from dic
sound of such texts is limite
little more than a systematic
diacritics), and they are set
collectors did include occasio
tures, and other nonalphabet
this, but the Menomini Texts and Plains Cree Texts of Leonard Bloomfield
stand as unrivaled monuments to what it is possible to do even with all the
handicaps of the dictation method.5 At the same time, Bloomfield recog-
nized, along with other major collectors such as Alfred Kroeber and Gladys
Reichard, that dictation distorts the shape of a performance, even when the
task of translation is left for later.6 He left us the following "typical Central
Algonquian sentence, such as for obvious reasons is not often obtained in
dictation":
A certain Assiniboine, a very handsome youth, with weaselskins on his coat and on
his breeches, with beads on all his clothes, and weaselskins also on his toque, and
horns, beside, on his headgear, he, standing right close to the fight, took yet no active
part in it, for he was awaiting his father, holding in his hand a lance and a tomahawk,
and a bowie knife; with his lance he had already transfixed two Blackfoot on the way
hither, and had tomahawked one, so that he had slain three, taking a part of each one's
scalp, in the thought, "Later I shall give them to my father," and taking also two of
their horses.7
As for the Chinookan stories reworked by Dell Hymes, it may still be that
live performances before Chinookan audiences were as terse and choppy as
the dictated texts left by Melville Jacobs. If so, Chinookan storytelling was
unusually rigid and formal, more like oratory and prayer than like the
storytelling found over much of the rest of North America. But even given
that the wording of these texts may not be far from that of former live perfor-
mances, we still have very little information as to how the full powers of the
voice were used.
In the case of living traditions the tape recorder should change all this,
linguists carry on almost as if it had never been invented: they listen to th
tapes with the same old alphabetic ear. From the point of view of sound, w
is published in the new Native American Texts Series of the Internationa
Journal of American Linguistics is not substantially different from texts t
in dictation by the founders of descriptive linguistics. When I myself f
went into the field in 1964, a linguist advised me that as soon as I h
transcribed my tapes of Zuni stories, I might as well erase them.8
TOWARD AN ORAL POETICS 509
Most linguists, if not ethnologis

for tape making rather than a li
the alphabetic ear. A tape of a
reminding one that stories are
isolated objects immediately a
Live performances are situated
rain and thunderclaps, togeth
members, unlike the collector
hotel room must give instructio
do if there were someone here.
trained by previous linguists, h
tigator's humanness at this po
Spanish or French so that the in
investigator then says, "No, tel
investigator will sooner or later
prose, adorned with a few footn
At this point the stage is fully s
marian and the structuralist, th
other, the translation.
We shall never develop an ef

structural analysis of conventio
created by ancient scribes or m
following out the possibilities s
have "discovered" the phoneme,
Structuralists, attempting to pu
have "discovered" eidons, mot
reductionist thinking to imagin
process by which syllables, wor
the factory of the mind. To asse
reductionist is forced to invoke
hopeful eye on the activities of
person cannot become a comp
grammatical rules, or a compete
pressions. The structuralist, if
thinking he will at last discover t
endure just one more little inci
But the possibility of an analy
animal was dead before it ever
Chomskian exposition were wr
typewriter; Chomsky may have
ing prior procedures, but that on
he, like his predecessors, was de
alphabetic writing.9 The texts
sembled the pelts and skeletons
sembled live animals, right from
On top of that, he has preferre
chalking in only such details as
case we should one day want t

given the courtesy of catalog
Bremond may at least be pre
Dissection does not recapitu
paring all the meaning away
structure, Levi-Strauss write
Ricoeur says, as if in answe
emptying language and the
not speaking only for thems
We shall never develop a me

porate the full dimensions of
structuralist scheme. Perfor
have already made some awkw
fessional meeting, I even hear
grammatical description of en
boondoggle, ripe for lavish p
phenomenon chosen for obse
analytical machinery needed
As Ricoeur has said, lingui
message for the sake of the c
intention for the sake of the
the bounds of a closed linguis
larger sociological structuralis
record of a performance, wh
tional alphabetic reduction, a
conventional description of so
enced by borrowings from an
speaking event that were scr
the beginning of this whole p
turalist treatment. Such featu
that the /a/ of the linguists is
so that we are here dealing w
closed system. But how long
loud is loud? At what point
does an annoyed tone become
qualities are not discrete enti
scheme, but they do make ch
With meaning we come to the
For the traditional structurali
eagle!" proceeds solely from w
contrasts between "that" an
so forth. The sociolinguist will
contrasting speech events, or
in a closed social system. 14 B
first something to say, becau
that conversely, language is n
refers to what is." 15When I

down a certain highway, I m
perched on a fencepost to our r
nothing outside of language or
bird as we whizzed by.
II
Although several of the authors in this issue of New Literary History seem
to be writing from within the bound universe of structuralism, each of them
allows openings or gaps which from a strictly structural point of view are
contradictions. Claude Bremond, although much of what he writes and charts
runs along orthodox structuralist lines, suggests that the "symbolic reso-
nances" of the "clandestine ox" motif help account for the fact that it main-
tains its popularity even when the internal structure of the enveloping story
does not make its import clear. He thus allows this motif to refer to or to
"resonate with" something outside the closed system of the story. But at this
point he resembles Don Antonio, the schoolteacher discussed by Fernandez:
as an "apostle of Castilian high culture," Don Antonio finds Asturian folk
poetry to be gross rather than refined. Bremond, for his part, barely allows
himself to mention, as if in embarrassment, that The Clandestine Ox motif
implies a return to the womb. As if to elevate his whole discussion in ad-
vance, he named this motif after a modem French novel.
Harold Scheub sees a "fully fleshed story" as "dictated" by an "underlying
formal set of relationships," and like most structuralists he fails to quote so
much as a single sentence from an actual text. But when he allows the closed
story a relationship to the outside world, he lets slip a contradiction: "The
ancient images, when joined to images of the contemporary world, provide a
profoundly traditional context for perceiving the objective world; this pro-
cess endows that world with a design and therefore a meaning that has no
existence outside the work of art." He came within a hair's breadth of allow-
ing meaning to exist between the story and the world, but then drew quickly
back into "the work of art," where "meaning" comes only from internal
"design." The aesthetic implied here is identical with that governing much
contemporary Western art, but it is clear even from Scheub's work that the
Xhosa understand stories to be something more than "pure form."
Dell Hymes declares himself to be a structuralist, but the paradox is that he
lets us look at the full text (though a dictated one) and a full translation. His
analysis literally runs alongside the text: he does not commit the fatal act of
allowing "scene i, stanza B, verse 4" to replace "Shush! Your uncle's wife!"
as part of some final algebraic reduction. He even admits that the pattern he
describes is "a little loose," but then he closes back in by adding, "I can only
say that it is flexible in keeping with specific narrative situations, but ines-
capable."'6 He has a tendency to want the text to fold back only upon itself,
which is why he finds it difficult to "assign closings a place" in his
"threefold division of aspec

such closings as, "Hurry! S
ing," solely within the perfo
that a story, being over wit
outside of itself. North Am
story time-which is very r
time, giving the audience
storytelling season. 1 Victor
far," which seems to refer o
North American stories. It
last survivor of her particul
the stories no longer referre
ing way of life. Like so mu
upon themselves and upon
remember only that far," sh
another level, the Clackamas
us who live here in North A
something outside of thems
Hymes proposes the admi
lives by way of a modern W
organization in Native Amer
possible, indeed essential, to
we simply succeed in assimil
will have missed the point
story was not simply an exe
ness of living on the North
Even in the West, notions o
been limited to purely form
us much closer to the realiza
application of modern struc
The distinction between histor

other verse-you might put the
species of history. ... Poetry is
history, since its statements ar
history are singulars. By a uni
kind of man will probably or n
it affixes proper names to the
what, say, Alcibiades did or ha
A rereading of earlier Engli

oral poetics. In Chaucer's t
creative literature in gene
seventeenth century that
When the word prose first c
to stress meter and was opp
time still referred to the vo
eighteenth century that "
opposed metrical:nonmetrical
first writers to do this, said i
the OED).
When I first made my claim
it) has no existence outside the
better understood as "drama
written prose fiction, I did no
found a way (radically differe
narrative into lines.19 What I
contains patterned repetition o
lel phrases to whole episodes, an
we call "poetry" and "song" th
stantively was that spoken nar
them, and that the content of s
cal (as opposed to prosaic). The
delivered, and in Zuni narrativ
purely formal considerations
whole sentences) in a single b
from predicate (or even a noun
extreme.20 These syncopated
which correspond to the gro
dramatic in a suspenseful pa
sentence becomes five lines:21
They brought him back, and when they

tried to unmask him
the mask
was stuck
to his face.
Even the longer pauses that sometimes accompany so large a formal bound-
ary as a shift of scene are frequently syncopated, falling after the narrator has
already started the first sentence of the new scene.22
If we wish to clear some breathing space for an oral poetics, the contem-
porary notion of "prose" can have no place in it except as a source of confu-
sion. Oral cultures no more have an oral equivalent of written prose than
they have motor-driven pipe organs. What they do have is poetry. Poetry in
the Aristotelian and in the pre-seventeenth-century English senses, and
poetry in a sense that Charles Olson was beginning to recover.
That brings us to George Quasha, who presents the poetics of a post-
modern poetry that works back toward the oral. Even Quasha lingers within
modern structuralism when he says (with Charles Stein) that the "processual
poem" of a poet like Robert Kelly is "measured by itself, and ultimately
referential to nothing outside its own embodiment," and when he says that
the poetic act is "language in the act of being true to itself." But as Ricoeur
has it, human discourse by its very nature "refers backwards and forwards,
to a speaker and to a world."23 If the poet writes in the first, second, or third
person, which Kelly does, h

and third parties. Only a h
nonsense syllables could com
and even then the sounds w
The attempt of modern ar
wards" to a doer and to the
poet. Robert Kelly, as quo
says that "the mouth is doi
tape recording, or an audien
mouth, which in a poetry r
of public speaking in a prim
picture, and one that compl
Indian orator of the ninet
mediate audience (which eve
ward to his own heart, sayin
only one heart (rather than
Heart, saying that he knew
ferred to his mouth, it was t
a crooked or forked one; oft
it was the "forked tongue,"
outer Spirit, that entered t
Modern poetry sees itself
tried to bind itself to the p
of such art tends to be limited to a narrow world of trained aesthetes, it is
only in proportion as the poet speaks from no farther back than the throat,
and the painter paints from no farther back than the elbow. But Quasha
himself points the way out when he speaks of an Olsonian poetics, with
"language specifically energized by its processual and eventual nature, rather
than by some set of qualities or formal conditions imposed according to an
aesthetic." The energy of language as event is rooted in the heart-and-lungs
and reaches out into the very cosmos, and when the poet deepens his voice
beyond the mouth and nasal cavities, he may also (in Quasha's words)
"throw the reader/listener back on direct experience." As a matter of fact, Kelly
already speaks with a deep voice, and his poems have the power to resonate
with one's own experience.
In these pages it is M. Ngal and James Fernandez who see most clearly the
nature of oral poetry in action, always joining itself to the real world of the
listener. They display only traces of an alphabet-rooted formalism, as when
Ngal drags behind him the notion of a "collective book." Fernandez, for his
part, presents us with a matrix, a form of systematic dismemberment that
goes all the way back to the "magical squares" of ancient occult writings and
comes down to us in the pages of Science magazine. But Ngal opens up a
whole world when he shows us that an African proverb, whose wording
remains the same, has a different referential meaning every time it is spoken.
And Fernandez, ears wide open to the repartee of Asturian bus passengers,
sees that it "calls them out of themselves and their social situation . . . to
larger perspectives." He speaks of an evocativeness whose outer limits are
drawn between the observed and the observer.
III
An oral poetics that begins w

participatory. It is no coinciden
African drum language, must r
rington, who "writes as one w
field-worker may be tempted
motor-driven shutter, as his fo
but the use of the recorder (if
though he may find it uncom
knobs and dials. When Scheu
storytelling, that has implicatio
Even anthropological linguistic
albeit in a very narrow way. Th
unwritten language has to pu
process of working out the app
know oral poetry the way the l
of language transmission, we m
far beyond learning how to pro
But with our full employment
defer the problem of meaning o
Looking back at the work of B
why it is so full of the observat
even though the stories were tak
turns out, give ample testimo
Bloomfield explains, on occasion
led up to the telling of a partic
gives the feeling of patient sten
Among the Quiche Maya, with
a year, it would be almost impo
participation. It was differen
storytelling is formally confin
the collector has to do is arran
whether in someone's house or
have no difficulty in thinking
Quiche, stories occur to peopl
bring them to mind: they never
a conversation about crocodiles
story about that," and proceeds
time or day or whether one is i
the story did come to mind, wo
It goes without saying that to h
and converse with them; one ca
storytelling occasion or to sch
become impatient with nonpa
turned to me and said, "When I
it down?"
Among the Yucatec Maya, Al

fact that storytelling there in
audience but a third role, th
merely listen, the respondent
an affirmation. He may also c
next when the narrator hesi
rapid antiphonal narration m
the narrator himself. The ro
requested the story or has th
hide behind his microphone.
stories only by accepting the
All of this does not mean th
ancient writings or early eth
but that such a study is a se
that is rooted in the living a
Lord did), "This is a book abo
of American Indian Narrativ
records of deceased traditio
"measure up." A restoration
Chinookan written literature
or measured verse, but requ
listened to, and that poetry
solely on alphabetic reduction
requires participation. Befor
meant pronouncing the word
do with ancient and ethnolog
be judged not on the basis of
on the basis of how it sounds
been reeducated to the subtl
There remains a question as
poetics. Members of primary
remarks about performances
marks are quickly forgotten.
the great critical discourse of
tional stories and the criticis
thing. When I do my version
audience may find recognizab
think that the protagonist is
may portray the protagonist
part of it, he will emulate it;
way on a separate occasion.
Just as the critical act in or
rather than waiting until it i
where the establishment of a
lation begins, rather than tak
always the possibility of furt
least, the possibility of a fur
oral poetics must be detailed librettos

oral performance, with white spaces f
is soft, large or bold type for what is
chanted, and so on. Only in this way
images we bring with us from so mu
pages of prose and verse. The voice
same time that the printing press ap
typesetting, which makes typograph
type did, comes just in time for the
there are endless calligraphic possibil
But the resistance is great: a colleagu
composed sermons, including the ful
to a professional journal that shoul
asked that the innovative transcript
grounds that "a majority of folkloris
we see revealed the otherwise hidden
eye in the establishment of critical te
stillbirth every time this happens. Nevertheless, folklorists,
ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists like Peter Gold, Jeff Titon, Daniel
Crowley, Jean Borgatti, Howard Norman, Allan Burns, Barbara Tedlock, and
myself have managed to see into print librettos that directly reflect oral
performance rather than the norms of written literature, especially in the
pages of Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics.29
At the same time, we are not awaiting an imagined end of literacy, or the
complete replacement of the critical texts of an oral poetics by sound films,
with translations run as subtitles or dubbed in. Films do not invite participa-
tion: the viewer is as silent as if he were silently reading a book. A
performance-oriented translation or transcription, like the script for a play,
invites the reader to use his own voice. This is where the opened page meets
up with oral storytelling: there is no proscenium arch, and no matter how
detailed the written script, there is no one true interpretation. Oral poetry
begins with the voice, and an oral poetics returns to the voice.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
NOTES
1 This discussion is based largely on Munro S. Edmonson, Lore: An Introduction

Science of Folklore and Literature (New York, 1971), esp. pp. 109-10, 114, 154-55;
Dennis Tedlock, "Verbal Art," in Handbook of North American Indians, ed. Willi
Sturtevant (Washington, in press), I, Ch. 50. The notion that song requires m
texts or that metrical texts necessarily suggest song (see Havelock) is of cou
ethnocentric Western one, rooted in a musical tradition that is, rhythmically spe
one of the least complex in the world.
2 Samuel Noah Kramer, Sumerian Mythology (New York, 1961).
3 For a discussion of the mind's eye as understood by psychologists, see G
Cohen, "Visual Imagery in Thought," New Literary History, 7 (1976), 513-23.
4 Dennis Tedlock, "On the Translat

can Folklore, 84 (1971), 114-33; Find
(New York, 1972); "Oral History as
of the variations through which "f
parallel episodes on pp. 97-109 of F
5 Leonard Bloomfield, Menomini
Society, 12 (1928); Plains Cree Texts
16 (1934).
6 A. L. Kroeber, A Mohave Historical Epic, University of California Anthropological
Records, 11 (1951), p. 133; Gladys Reichard, An Analysis of Coeur d'Alene Myths,
Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 41 (1947), p. 5.
7 Plains Cree Texts, pp. 86-87.
8 Tapes of the original Zuni language performances of the stories in Finding the
Center are available for listening in the library of the American Philosophical Society,
105 South Fifth Street, Philadelphia.
9 As Jacques Derrida has shown in Of Grammatology (tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
[Baltimore, 1976], Pt. 1, Ch. 2), the founders of the science of linguistics, in their
vehement insistence that they were students of spoken rather than of written language,
were obscuring the originary dependence of their discipline on alphabetic writing,
behaving as if it were a guilty secret.
10 Claude Levi-Strauss, Mythologiques IV: L'Homme nu (Paris, 1971).
11 Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection," In-
ternational Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1962), 191-218.
12 For a discussion of the "syntactical" reduction of speech events, see Dell Hymes,
"Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life," in Directions in Sociolinguis-
tics, ed. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (New York, 1972), pp. 66-69.
13 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort
Worth, 1976), p. 3.
14 On the last page of Foundations in Sociolinguistics (Philadelphia, 1974), Hymes
pushes sociolinguistics to its systemic limit when he identifies its expansion as a field
of study with the emergence of a "world society." When we remember the debt of
social science in general to linguistics, whose scientificity is heavily invested in
phonology (reduction-to-alphabet) and the notion of "the arbitrariness of signs" (see
Derrida, pp. 33, 44, 48, 50, 52), it is strange (or prophetic) that Hymes inserts, on this
very same page, a quotation from Chairman Mao. The Chinese, of course, have re-
fused Latinization and are now achieving widespread literacy with a writing system
that is not composed of arbitrary signs, a system that would suggest an entirely differ-
ent linguistics.
15 Interpretation Theory, p. 21.
16 Hymes's work resembles that of Everett Fox (following Martin Buber and Franz
Rosenzweig) on the Hebrew Testament, in that he does not force his text into a totally
mechanical model. In contrast is the work of Munro Edmonson, who breaks the entire
Popol Vuh into couplets, even though the text itself varies this pattern with triplets and
quatrains; when the text has phrases that seem to stand alone, Edmonson is forced to
hypothesize "missing lines" in order to complete his pattern. Everett Fox, "In the
Beginning," Response, No. 14 (1972), 9-159; Munro S. Edmonson, The Book of Counsel:
The Popol Vuh of the Quichd Maya of Guatemala, Publications of the Middle American
Research Institute, Tulane University, 35 (1971).
17 See Tedlock, "Verbal Art," for a more lengthy discussion of this topic.
18 Poetics 1451b. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, tr. W. Rhys Roberts and
Ingram Bywater (New York, 1954).
19 "On the Translation of Style," pp. 129-32.
20 Ibid., pp. 128-29.

21 Finding the Center, p. 220.
22 "On the Translation of Style," p.
23 Interpretation Theory, p. 22.
24 See W. C. Vanderwerth, Indian
passim.
25 Allan Burns, "Pattern in Yucatec Mayan Narrative Performance," Diss. University
of Washington 1973.
26 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (New York, 1965), p. iii.
27 This reeducation does not merely involve a revival of the elocution once taught so
widely by speech departments; a good oral storyteller does not necessarily sound like
Sir John Gielgud.
28 The calligrapher Kris Holmes, in association with the typographer Charles A.
Bigelow (and Dell Hymes), is beginning to explore these possibilities; some of this
work will appear in a future issue of Alcheringa.
29 For Gold's transcription of an Afro-American sermon, see Alcheringa old series
No. 4 (1972), pp. 1-14, with insert disc recording; Titon's transcription of two Afro-
American narratives is in new series 2, No. 1 (1976), 2-26, with disc. Crowley presents
a Bahamian tale in old series No. 5 (1973), pp. 107-9; Borgatti translates Midwestern
Nigerian chants in new series 2, No. 1 (1976), 60-71, with disc. The Cree and Ojibwa
narratives of Norman are in old series No. 5 (1973), pp. 112-19, and in new series 2,
No. 1 (1976), 124-27. Burns translates Yucatec Maya narratives in old series No. 4
(1972), pp. 97-103; old series No. 5 (1973), pp. 101-5; and new series 1, No. 1 (1975),
99-107. Barbara Tedlock translates an Osage choral simultaneity in old series No. 1
(1970), pp. 52-56. My own translations of Zuni narratives (in addition to those in
Finding the Center) are in old series No. 3 (1971), pp. 76-81; old series No. 5 (1973), pp.
120-25, with disc; and new series 1, No. 1 (1975), 110-50.

Toward An Oral Poetics

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Toward An Oral Poetics

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Toward an Oral Poetics

Author(s): Dennis Tedlock

WE SHALLingNEVER DEVELOP an effective oral poetics if we begin by read-

able: their wording is free fr

We shall never develop an ef

Most linguists, if not ethnologis

We shall never develop an ef

case we should one day want t

We shall never develop a me

refers to what is." 15When I

"threefold division of aspec

The distinction between histor

A rereading of earlier Engli

They brought him back, and when they

person, which Kelly does, h

An oral poetics that begins w

Among the Yucatec Maya, Al

oral poetics must be detailed librettos

1 This discussion is based largely on Munro S. Edmonson, Lore: An Introduction

4 Dennis Tedlock, "On the Translat

20 Ibid., pp. 128-29.

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