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Article Excerpt
Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" has exercised great cultural influence since its initial publication in the late seventeenth century. Numerous iterations of this tale of blood and violence were told and revised through many media and time periods, but it was not until the last handful of decades that these tales have stopped blaming the wife's "female curiosity" for Bluebeard's murderous rage. Despite some of these contemporary revisions, Perrault's tale itself fits in with other culturally powerful tales, reinforcing and lending support to particular values in a way that Maria Tatar describes as follows: "Like many of our foundational cultural stories, 'Bluebeard' turns on a woman's desire for forbidden knowledge and, in its canonical French form, describes that desire as a curse. The intellectual curiosity of men may have given us fire, divided us from animals, and produced civilization, but the curiosity of women--as we know from the stories of Pandora, Eve, Psyche, and Lot's wife, among others--has given rise to misery, evil, and grief" (Secrets 3). Thus we can see that the patriarchal messages and mores embedded within Perrault's tale restate and strengthen similar messages that come from texts that are foundational to Western culture. Given my interests in Hawaiian literature and indigenous ways of knowing, my first question is: What happens when stories such as "Bluebeard" are taken out of this Western cultural context and placed into one in which Pandora, Eve, Psyche, and Lot's wife are not "foundational"?
Many avenues for examining this question present themselves in the Hawaiian-language newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning in 1834 and running until the late 1940s, at least a hundred Hawaiian-language newspapers were published, covering an array of topics including missionary censures of native practice, political debate, cultural description, the latest news from abroad, and serial stories, both native and foreign. It is the publication of foreign stories that is of the most interest here, because on June 14, 1862, in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, the longest-running Hawaiian-language newspaper, a version of Perrault's "Bluebeard" was translated into Hawaiian and became "Umiumi Uliuli," entering a cultural tradition in which women were not "casualties of their own curiosity," like Eve and Pandora, but powerful goddesses of fertility and rebirth, like Haumea and Hina. (1)
By the time this translation was published, Hawaiians had an extremely high level of literacy and were voracious readers, consuming books and articles from a myriad of countries. (2) Because of the strong influence Christianity held in Hawai'i after Calvinist missionaries arrived in 1820, the people were well aware of Eve and of Lot's wife, and they were also likely familiar with Pandora through the Western education they were receiving in the public and private schools of the time. But since the mission had been established for only a few decades, these stories did not form the basis of how Hawaiians and their culture viewed women. Their views were much more informed by their traditional stories and chants, which first circulated orally and then through printed outlets like the newspapers. These stories were filled with figures such as Pele, the volcano goddess who lives in Kilauea and is one of the most powerful deities in the Hawaiian host of four hundred thousand gods; Haumea, a goddess often tied to fertility, who is reborn in every Hawaiian woman; and Hina, a goddess whose many incarnations were associated with everything from the moon to fishing.
The subjects of these stories were not only deities, though. Hawaiian stories and songs also celebrated contemporary women, such as the powerful chiefess Ka'ahumanu, favorite wife of Kamehameha, who ruled Hawai'i in all but name after his death. At a time when women were at best helpmates in most Western contexts, many Hawaiian texts were emphasizing the important public role that ali'i, or chiefly (meaning noble rank), women played. Thus, portrayals of femininity and its powers as goddesses or women were quite different from those in foundational Western stories, and to make these foreign stories palatable to Hawaiian audiences, many aspects of the stories would have had to have been changed, whether directly, through the translator's choice, or indirectly, through the set of words available in Hawaiian to describe women.
Translation and the Hawaiian-Language Newspapers
To help frame this study of "Umiumi Uliuli," I will begin with a discussion of how translation in general was used in Hawai'i during the time in which this story was published. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, translation was a major factor in Hawaiian interactions with foreigners. Indeed, the entire history of Hawaiian literacy in the nineteenth century is tied to translation, as efforts to formalize a standard Hawaiian alphabet were mainly carried out to allow the Calvinist missionaries to print religious tracts for Hawaiians in their own language and to facilitate translation of the Bible. (3) Nearly all "literature" and "literary" translations published in the first few decades of the nineteenth century were of a religious nature and came under the aegis of the mission and its printers. (4) But with increased native involvement in the printing of newspapers and books, along with the advent of the independent press in 1861, literature and translation took on a more secular characteristic. Hawaiian-language newspapers published descriptions of Hawaiian traditions, Hawaiian mo'olelo (history/epic/story/account), and articles about local concerns, and translated everything from news items found in foreign newspapers to European and American novels and stories.
Though a good deal of recent scholarship has focused on the traditional Hawaiian mo'olelo published in these newspapers, examining the political and cultural motivations and consequences of their publication, relatively little has focused on the foreign stories that were translated into Hawaiian, despite the fact that they make up a significant portion of the Hawaiian newspaper repository. (5) Printed right next to the Hawaiian mo'olelo were stories such as Ivanhoe, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Tempest, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Robinson Crusoe. These stories were no less carefully chosen for publication and appeared with as much, if not more, frequency than Hawaiian stories, yet much less scholarly work has dealt with these texts. Research and writings by Puakea Nogelmeier and Noenoe Silva have shown how English-language translations of Hawaiian works have often served to assimilate and present Hawaiian thought and tradition in a way that is concomitant with Western values and understandings, even going so far as to massively reorganize the Hawaiian texts to better fit in with Western notions of history and culture. (6) But even with the work by these Hawaiian-language specialists, not much is known about how translation operated from "powerful" European languages into Hawaiian, and it is still rather unclear what role translations from foreign languages into Hawaiian served in the Hawaiian-language newspapers.
In the first issue of his Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, published on October 1, 1861, Henry Whitney stated that one of the attributes of the paper would be a dedication "to a dissemination of foreign ideas, both as regards mode of life, habits, business and industry; with a view to improve, expand and elevate the native mind; that the natives may rise to an equality with foreigners." Along with that, after listing other areas the newspaper would focus on, such as foreign and local news, new farming techniques, and illustrations, he summed up the paper's philosophy as follows: "In short, it will endeavor to furnish from week to week such reading matter as may tend to develop and enlarge the Hawaiian mind, and enable Hawaiians to think, feel, act and live more like foreigners." With this statement in hand, it is easy to dismiss translated foreign stories as nothing more than assimilationist materiel, meant to bring Hawaiians into the fold and embrace the superiority of outside ways. But even if some of the stories were meant to further these aims, they continued to be printed throughout the entire Hawaiian-language newspaper print run, with the very last paper, Ka Hoku o Hawaii, running stories such as Tarzan, until the 1930s. Newspapers that staunchly supported Hawaiian nationalism and cultural empowerment, including the pro-Lili'uokalani Ka Makaainana, published translated stories right alongside calls for Hawaiians to resist foreign encroachment into political and cultural spheres. (7) Even Ka Hoku o ka Pakipika, which went into publication one week before Whitney's Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, and was explicitly founded to be "he nupepa nana e hoolaha ae i na manao o na kanaka Hawaii" [a newspaper that would circulate the thoughts and ideas of Hawaiians ("Kalaihi")], printed selections from the Arabian Nights and other foreign stories throughout its three-year run.
Carrying Bluebeard across Language and Genre
As can be seen, the ubiquity of these translated stories and the range of Hawaiian newspapers where they were published imply that these translations were not a mere tool of assimilation, and there is likely no single overarching purpose that these foreign stories as a whole served, except perhaps entertainment. (8) Each story, then, has to be examined within the context of the historical period in which it was published, looking at factors such as the politics of the particular newspaper, including that of the editors and translators, and even what events may have precipitated its publication. Then the translation itself has to be examined against those criteria as well, because even though newspaper editors and publishers, such as Whitney, may have had certain moralizing and civilizing agendas when publishing these stories, the process of translation can easily change or even obscure these kinds of messages.
With "Bluebeard," for example, Henry Whitney may have published the story intending to disseminate certain morals that would "enlarge the Hawaiian mind," but as we shall see, these values might not have come across in the manner he intended. Regarding the kind of "carrying across" that translation accomplishes, Lawrence Venuti asserts: "Translation never communicates in an untroubled fashion because the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text by reducing them and supplying another set of differences, basically domestic, drawn from the receiving...
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