Paul G. Zolbrod, an English professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., may have done for the Navajos what Homer did for the Greeks.
One must use the qualifying ”may have” because Homer`s rendering of the Greek oral tradition has stood the test of at least 27 centuries, while Zolbrod`s version of the Navajo oral tradition–”Dine Bahane: The Navajo Creation Story”–has only just been published, by the University of New Mexico Press.
Nevertheless, Zolbrod`s poetic translation, 12 years in the making, has received accolades as an extraordinary literary event.
It is ”a brilliant rendering of a folk epic into a fascinating and highly literate work of art . . . a crossover between literature and anthropology and philosophy,” wrote Jamake Highwater, an author and expert on Native American culture, in the New York Times Book Review.
It is ”one of the finest expositions on Navajo culture that has ever been written,” said Susan Brown McGreevy, a research associate at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, N.M.
Zolbrod has done a ”splendid job” of capturing the poetry of the Navajo storytellers, said Stanley Lindberg of the Georgia Review, which published excerpts.
”Dine Bahane” tells the story of the emergence of the insectlike
”Nilch`i dine`e,” or ”air-spirit people,” from deep within the Earth and how they gradually made their way through four worlds to the surface, where, in the fifth world, they evolved into ”nihookaa` dine`e,” or ”Earth- surface people,” and then into human clans forming an intricate society.
It has the elements of such classic ”origin” stories as the Bible, the Beowulf saga, the Homeric epics–gods and monsters, good and evil, floods and migrations, sex and violence.
To get the story, Zolbrod, 52, had to run a gantlet of obstacles, human and supernatural.
For one thing, he had to learn the Navajo language, which some linguists consider the most difficult in the world. Navajo, one of the Athapascan family of Indian tongues, is a tonal language in which small nuances of sound can create huge differences in meaning, with particles and tenses that have no precise equivalent in any other Western language. (During World War II, Navajos served as U.S. signal men–”code talkers”–in Europe and the Pacific, relaying information to and from the front lines, to the bafflement of the enemy.)
A more serious obstacle was the hostility Zolbrod encountered among some Navajos to the setting down in writing of their oral tradition by anyone, especially a white man.
”We don`t want a Bible like the white man publishes,” said Alfred Yazzi, director of the Navajo Resource Center in Rough Rock, N.M. When a non- Navajo writes about the tradition they are trying to protect, he added,
”Navajos resent it, especially those involved in ceremonies, like healers. I`m a healer myself, and what I know about my ceremony is very valuable to me.”
Zolbrod, visiting Philadelphia for an appearance before the Philadelphia- area Allegheny College alumni association, said in a recent interview that one young man predicted ”the gods would punish me” if he pursued the project.
”I had to do some real grappling over this, and it became a moral issue,”
he said.
He was not greatly troubled by fear of divine retribution–although he did recall the case of Washington Matthews. An Army surgeon who in 1897 published his English prose translation of much of the story in a book called ”Navajo Legends,” Matthews subsequently suffered a paralytic stroke, and
”some Navajos still believe he had that stroke because he put this stuff down.”
What Zolbrod did have qualms about was whether he, an outsider, had the right to translate the sacred tradition if Navajos wanted to keep it within the tribe, and whether, if he did, he could do justice to it.
”It`s a beautiful story,” he said. ”It does more than any story I know to probe the nature of male-female relationships. It tells us about one of many ancient cultures that are indigenous to the New World. It deals with certain kinds of universals, such as the problem of evil, such as the forces that animate the world. It`s poetry in the deepest sense.”
Finally, he consulted a number of Navajo elders, who, ”afraid that otherwise the young people would lose sight of the traditions,” gave him their blessing and, along the way, their hospitality and their help.
”Once I began to learn the language and could communicate with these people in some cursory way in their own tongue, I can remember going into Navajo homes–simple hogans, small trailers–and being greeted with more hospitality than I`ve ever experienced anywhere,” Zolbrod said.
Nevertheless, he had some ”spooky experiences,” one having to do with a bird, often the harbinger of evil in Navajo tradition.
”I remember one night I was sitting in the ceremonial hogan of a Navajo informant who became a close friend. It was around the time of the winter solstice. . . . We were talking about some really difficult passage in the story, and he was being particularly lucid–we were having a great session. All of a sudden, a bird came in through the smoke hole at the top of the hogan, flew around and flew out again. . . .
”Harry just froze. He didn`t say anything for several minutes. Then he said, `We have to stop now, we have to go.` Harry and I never talked about this. He never mentioned it again.”
How did Zolbrod, who is not an anthropologist (his specialty is Renaissance literary theory), come to be so fascinated with the Navajos?
It happened, he said, by ”sheer happenstance.” Honeymooning in 1967, about three years after he came to Allegheny College as an English instructor, he and his wife stumbled onto an Indian museum in Montana. Reading the Indian narratives, he was struck by the thought that while the Indians didn`t have
”alphabetical technology” and printing, they must have poetry. ”People have poetry before they write it down.”
Scholars, he knew, had been studying Native American literature for more than a century. Yet much of what he had seen had been set down as children`s stories, a kind of condescension, at best. In fact, Indians have an ancient and highly sophisticated culture, Zolbrod said. ”We think American history began with the Mayflower, but that is wrong.”
To put the creation story together, Zolbrod tapped a variety of sources
–published and unpublished documents, tribal archives, elders, medicine men and relatives of medicine men, and the Matthews prose translation. Listening, hour upon hour, day after day, to the storytellers, he noted the kind of variations of minor detail that one finds in, say, the Arthurian cycle, while the significant details remained constant.
Thanks to Matthews, Zolbrod was spared much basic research, but he discovered that Matthews himself had spared the Victorian sensibilities of his readers. He had simply eliminated almost everything having to do with a crucial element of the story–sex.
”The heart of the whole Navajo cosmic scheme is this delicate relationship between male and female,” Zolbrod said. ”In the Navajo scheme of things, everything is divided into male and female–male rain and female rain, male clouds and female clouds–and in order for the whole universe to exist in this state of delicate balance, man and woman have to get along.
”And getting along involves nothing less than an equitable kind of sexual relationship. When First Woman creates genitals, the implication is that males and females are both supposed to enjoy sex. When First Man and First Woman quarrel, she accuses him of treating her as a sex object, he accuses her of not appreciating the things that he does for her, like hunting. They separate and the monsters are born, because each is trying to seek sexual gratification without the other.
”That`s an aberration of this primal life force. That`s what you could call misspent sexual energy. That`s what this whole story is about.”
