[Translation.]
Song
Ax of broadest edge I’m hight;
The island groups I’ve visited,
Islands of Mala-la-walu,
Seat of Ka-maulu-a-niho,
Grandam of Kama, the swine-god.
I have seen Pi’i-lani’s glory,
Whose fame spreads over the islands.
Enamored was I of Pele;
Her beauty holds court at the fire-pit,
Given to ravage the plains of Puna.
Mischievous son of Ku, and of Hina,
Whose cloud-bloom hangs in ether,
The pig-shaped cloud that shadows Haupu.
An impulse comes to return to Kahiki—
The chains of the pit still gall me,
The tabu cliff of Ka-moho-alii,
The mount that is ever ablaze.
I thought to have domiciled with her;
Was driven away by mere shame—
The shameful abuse of the goddess!
Go thou, go I—a truce to the shame.
It was your manners that shamed me.
Free to you was the house we lived in.
These were the deeds of Broad-edged-Ax,
Who has seen the whole group of islands.
Olopana’s firstborn am I,
Nursed in the arms of Ku-ula;
Hers were the roosts for the gamecocks.
The wilds of Ka-liu-wa’a my home,
That too my craft back to Kahiki;
This my farewell to Hawaii,
Land of the God’s immigration.
Strangers we came to Hawaii;
A stranger thou, a stranger I,
Called Broad-edged-Ax:
I’ve read the cloud-omens in heaven.
It curls, it curls! his tail—it curls!
Look, it clings to his buttocks!
Faugh, faugh, faugh, faugh, uff!
What! Ka-haku-ma’a-lani your name!
Answer from heaven, oh Kane!
My song it is done!
If one can trust, the statement of the Hawaiian who communicated the above mele, it represents only a portion of the whole composition, the first canto—if we may so term it—having dropped into the limbo of forgetfulness. The author’s study of the mele lends no countenance to such a view. Like all Hawaiian poetry, this mele wastes no time with introductory flourishes; it plunges at once in medias res.
Hawaiian mythology figured Pele, the goddess of the volcano, as a creature of passion, capable of many metamorphoses; now a wrinkled hag, asleep in a cave on a rough lava bed, with banked fires and only an occasional blue flame playing about her as symbols of her power; now a creature of terror, riding on a chariot of flame and carrying destruction; and now as a young woman of seductive beauty, as when she sought passionate relations with the handsome prince, Lohiau; but in disposition always jealous, fickle, vengeful.
Kama-pua’a was a demigod of anomalous birth, character, and make-up, sharing the nature and form of a man and of a hog, and assuming either form as suited the occasion. He was said to be the nephew of Olopana, a king of Oahu, whose kindness in acting as his foster father he repaid by the robbery of his henroosts and other unfilial conduct. He lived the lawless life of a marauder and freebooter, not confining his operations to one island, but swimming from one to another as the fit took him. On one occasion, when the farmers of Waipi’o, whom he had robbed, assembled with arms to bar his retreat and to deal vengeance upon him, he charged upon the multitude, overthrew them with great slaughter, and escaped with his plunder.
Toward Pele Kama-pua’a assumed the attitude of a lover, whose approaches she at one time permitted to her peril. The incident took place in one of the water caves—volcanic bubbles—in Puna, and at the level of the ocean; but when he had the audacity to invade her privacy and call to her as she reposed in her home at Kilauea she repelled his advances and answered his persistence with a fiery onset, from which he fled in terror and discomfiture, not halting until he had put the width of many islands and ocean channels between himself and her.
In seeking an explanation of this myth of Pele, the volcano god and Kama-pua’a, who, on occasion, was a sea-monster, there is no necessity to hark back to the old polemics of Asia. Why not account for this remarkable myth as the statement in terms of passion familiar to all Hawaiians of those impressive natural phenomena that were daily going on before them? The spectacle of the smoking mountain pouring out its fiery streams, overwhelming river and forest, halting not until they had invaded the ocean; the awful turmoil as fire and water came in contact; the quick reprisal as the angry waves overswept the land; then the subsiding and retreat of the ocean to its own limits and the restoration of peace and calm, the fiery mount still unmoved, an apparent victory for the volcanic forces. Was it not this spectacular tournament of the elements that the Hawaiian sought to embody and idealize in his myth of Pele and Kama-pua’a? [451]
Footnote 451:[ (return) ] “The Hawaiian tradition of Pele, the dread goddess of the volcanic fires,” says Mr. Fornander, “analogous to the Samoan Fe’e, is probably a local adaptation in aftertimes of an elder myth, half forgotten and much distorted. The contest related in the legend between Pele and Kamapua’a, the eight-eyed monster demigod, indicates, however, a confused knowledge of some ancient strife between religious sects, of which the former represented the worshipers of fire and the latter those with whom water was the principal element worthy of adoration.” (Abraham Fornander, The Polynesian Race, pp. 51, 52, Trubner & Co., London.)
The likeness to be found between the amphibious Kama-pua’a and the hog appeals picturesquely to one’s imagination in many ways. The very grossness of the hog enables him becomingly to fill the role of the Beast as a foil to Pele, the Beauty. The hog’s rooting snout, that ravages the cultivated fields; his panicky retreat when suddenly disturbed; his valiant charge and stout resistance if cornered; his lowered snout in charge or retreat; his curling tail—how graphically all these features appeal to the imagination in support of the comparison which likens him to a tidal wave.