American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In a recent issue of this journal William Bright has presented a Karok myth cycle from northwestern California as a sequence of lines of verse. Bright remarks that the presentation of the Karok text and the English translation is based on the principles of recent work by Dennis Tedlock (1971, 1972) and myself (Hymes 1976, 1977). The presentation, indeed, combines a principle adopted by Tedlock in the presentation of Zuni narratives, with a principle adopted by myself in the presentation of narratives of the Chinookan-speaking peoples of Oregon and Washington. Tedlock and I both recognize that American Indian narratives may have the structure of poetry, may consist of lines organized in verses; but whereas Tedlock finds Zuni narrative to have lines on the basis of pauses in speech, I have found Chinookan narratives to have lines on the basis of certain features of syntax, features that are discernible in written and printed transcriptions. Each predication in a text is likely to be a line, whether or wherever the speaker may have paused. Particles that are translated as 'now', 'then', and the like are markers of lines and groups of lines (verses), and enab le us to discover the poetic pattern of a narrative, even though the written record does not reveal the intonational phrasing and pausing that Tedlock can attend to on tape recordings. In presenting the Karok cycle, "Coyote's Journey," Bright is able to reconcile these two approaches. On the one hand, initial particles, such as 'now', 'then' and the like, occur in the Karok myth, and Bright recognizes a unit of verse almost everywhere they occur. On the other hand, Bright knows where minor and major pauses occur in the telling of the myth, and finds that each line ends with a minor pause, while the groups of lines that form verses each end with a major pause. Since verses almost always coincide with the occurrence of sentence-initial particles, the two kinds of features, pauses and particles, cooperate in marking the poetic structure of the myth.