And retelling them has meant that I have had to find a new form for the stories. The form that I choose to give them is that of the European folk-tale.
In Hawaiian romance there is a feeling that is rare in any body of popular European romance—a feeling for the beauty of nature, for flowers and trees, the aspect of the clouds, the look of the sea, the sight of mountains, for the beauty of the rainbow and the waterfall. And part of the [[xxviii]]delight in retelling these stories is in recalling the beauties of places that are beautifully named. To be true in any measure to the originals these stories of my retelling should have in them the rainbow and the waterfall, the volcano, the forest, the surf as it foams over the reef of coral. In the hula or Hawaiian ballet, and in the poetry that is related to the hula, there is, as Dr. Nathaniel Emerson has observed, always an idyllic feeling. This idyllic feeling pervades Hawaiian romance also. The scene of many of the stories, when not laid in lands that are frankly mythical, is laid in an Hawaiian Arcadia. And how memorable these lands are!—Ku-ai-he-lani, the Country that Supports the Heavens, and Pali-uli, the easeful land that the gods have since hidden. Who would not roam through these lands with those who first told of them and who first heard of them—the gracious and vivid children of Wakea and Papa?
PADRAIC COLUM. [[1]]
[1] Quoted by Melville in Typee, Chapter XXV. The chronicle of de Figeroas’s voyage—the voyage by which the Marquesas were discovered and the Polynesians looked upon for the first time by European man—was published in Madrid, according to Melville, in 1613. Mendaña’s voyage was made in 1595. [↑]
[2] By Ivor H. N. Evans, M.A., Cambridge University Press, 1923. [↑]
[3] Written kapu in Hawaiian and taboo by the mariners who came first amongst the Polynesians. I have been instructed to write the word tapu. Its meaning is not merely “forbidden”: it means “sacred,” “inviolate,” “belonging to the gods.” In the four stories in the present collection where tapu is in operation I have made no attempt to explain its significance; I have merely said that it was forbidden to go to that place or go near that person. [↑]
[4] Published by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, 1923. [↑]