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It was Kenneth Rexroth's good sense coming out of a life dedicated, strongly, to poetry to bring to our attention the remarkable poetry in the words, the language, of American Indian songs. In the groundbreaking essay that follows, circa 1956, Rexroth is looking in turn at the works of Frances Densmore: acts of translation.
American Indian Songs Kenneth Rexroth
In all the public and academic libraries in America and in most of the principal libraries of the world, off in a corner somewhere or in a seldom entered room, you can find a good many square feet of bookshelves lined with the olive-green publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a department of the Smithsonian Institution. There are forty-seven annual reports, from 1881 to 1932, royal octavo volumes lavishly illustrated, averaging around eight hundred pages each. After the forty-seventh report, the ethnological and anthropological material has been published separately. There are about one hundred and fifty bulletins in octavo; these run from thirty-two to one thousand pages, and include the annual anthropological papers about ten articles to each volume published each year since the forty-seventh annual report. Besides this there have been a couple of hundred other miscellaneous publications.
This is the largest body of anthropological literature ever published by one institution, private or public. Although it is readily available to every American citizen in his nearby library and at least to every inhabitant of a national capital elsewhere, it is little known and less read even by anthropologists. This is not due to the quality of its scientific writing. Many of America's major anthropologists are included, often with their greatest works. | |
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