THE POETRY OF PRE-LITERATE PEOPLES
An unpublished anthology gathered by Kenneth Rexroth (ca. 1975)
Editorial Note
Introduction
1. The Far North
2. The American Indian
3. Central and South America
4. Africa
5. The South Seas
6. Asia
7. Australia
Editorial Note
Kenneth Rexroth had been very interested in preliterate peoples and their poetry
and songs since his childhood. His autobiography
includes a moving account of his
time spent with an old Potawatomi Indian who worked as a gardener and handyman
for his grandmother in Indiana around 1910-1912, as well as a more adult
adventure with some Navajo women in the early 1920s. Some of his earliest poems are clearly influenced by
preliterate songs,
and even incorporate passages from them. In 1956 he
wrote an appreciative article, American Indian
Songs, with numerous examples of translations by the great
ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore.
Sometime during the early 1970s he put together a selection of texts for a book to be titled The Poetry of Pre-Literate Peoples. He apparently had a prospective publisher, and the “Other Books by Kenneth Rexroth” page in some of his books from around that time lists him as editor of “An Anthology of Pre-Literate Poetry,” so it sounds like he was definitely expecting it to happen.
Unfortunately, the project was never completed. Perhaps the prospective publisher ended up declining it. But Rexroth was pretty well known at that time, and I doubt if he would have had any problem finding another publisher. More likely, perhaps Rexroth himself concluded that at that stage of his life (he was in his seventies and had some health issues) he had too many other projects in the works to want to spend the time to do the research and annotations that would have been necessary to bring this one to conclusion. He may also have felt that such a book was becoming somewhat redundant. Some of the translations he had selected had already been included in the anthology edited by Willard Trask: The Unwritten Song: Poetry of the Primitive and Traditional Peoples of the World (2 vols: 1966-1967), and he was well aware of the flurry of new translations being published or inspired by Jerome Rothenberg in his Technicians of the Sacred (1968; revised and expanded edition: 1985) and Shaking the Pumpkin (1972) and in his “ethnopoetics” journal Alcheringa. (Rexroth had used them in his popular “Poetry and Song” course at UC Santa Barbara in the early 1970s.)
Whatever the reason, all that remains is a box of papers in the Rexroth collection at the library of the State University of New York at Buffalo. I purchased a copy of the entire manuscript from that library. It consists of approximately 370 typed double-spaced pages + 130 pages of interleaved questions regarding notes that might need to be added + a second identical batch that includes handwritten corrections by Rexroth plus occasional handwritten comments or queries by someone else who Rexroth presumably asked to review the draft.
Leaving aside the duplications and the interleaved pages, the significant material reproduced here consists of translations of preliterate songs gathered from numerous sources (350 pages) + an Introduction by Rexroth (13 pages) + an untitled note (3 pages) apparently addressed to the prospective publisher in which Rexroth outlines the nature of the project. In that note he calls attention to the numerous questions still to be resolved. He admits that he does not know the answers to many of those questions and would have to research them himself or ask appropriate specialists about them.
Those 366 pages are reproduced here with the permission of Bradford Morrow, Literary Executor of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust (with the qualification noted below). For the most part I have transcribed them just as they appear in the manuscript except for corrections of obvious typos. In a few instances I have noticed slight stylistic differences between the version of a song in the draft and in the original publication from which Rexroth transcribed it, or from a reprinting of it that he noted in another anthology (most frequently in Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, in C.M. Bowra’s Primitive Song, or in the above-mentioned anthology by Willard Trask). These comparisons have occasionally clarified the meaning of the texts, but I have usually followed the manuscript, assuming that Rexroth may have intended to modify the translation.
Readers should bear in mind that this is just an unfinished draft. The manuscript pages I have transcribed are photocopies of carbon copies, so it has sometimes been difficult to decipher all the words, or even to distinguish between periods and commas. If the book had been published, these kinds of issues would have been resolved, Rexroth probably would have revised and perhaps expanded his Introduction, and he certainly would have added notes to clarify some of the obscurities in the songs.
In rare cases, I myself have added explanatory notes (always within square brackets) drawing on information I have come upon in the Radin, Bowra, or Trask books, or in even rarer cases from the original collections of texts that I have perused online. But in the vast majority of cases I have left the song texts exactly as they are in the Rexroth manuscript.
Even in this unfinished form, I think it’s a wonderful collection. I’ve greatly enjoyed becoming familiar with these works and getting a better understanding of why Rexroth was enthusiastic enough to take the trouble to gather them together.
—Ken Knabb
July 2024
The Poetry of Pre-Literate Peoples is the manuscript of an unpublished anthology gathered by Kenneth Rexroth (ca. 1975). The Introduction and other editorial material by Rexroth in it are copyright 2024 and reproduced here with permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust. However, neither the Rexroth Trust nor Rexroth’s Literary Executor assumes any legal responsibility for my posting of the various translated song lyrics that Rexroth tentatively selected for inclusion in his anthology; they are posted here exclusively on my own responsibility. The sources of each of the translations are specified at the bottom of the webpage where they appear. These translations were originally published between 1875 and 1973. Most of the books and scholarly journals in which they originally appeared are long out of print, and many of them are in the public domain. I have reproduced them here as a noncommercial public service. If any of them are still copyrighted and the copyright owner has any objections, please notify me and I will remove them from this site. —Ken Knabb