Semi-OT: "Song of Hiawatha" - 150th anniversary today!
leno...@yahoo.com
(Be sure to check the bottom of this post!)
That is, today is the anniversary according to the guide at Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow's house on Brattle St, Cambridge, MA, just a
couple of miles from my apartment. (I could have sworn that one bio of
Longfellow said the book was published in October of 1855, but other
sources seem to back the guide up.)
I love my adapted version that I received as a child, with colorful
illustrations by Armstrong Sperry. (Oddly, they didn't seem to be
familiar with that version when I was at Longfellow's house this summer
- even though I remember seeing, years ago, a T-shirt with a Sperry
picture of Hiawatha as a baby and his broken-hearted, abandoned
mother.)
http://tinyurl.com/dkh9e
(Book covers by Sperry. You have to click on the "Hiawatha" cover at
the bottom to enlarge it, which will also show you one of my favorite,
slightly eerie pictures from the book.)
"Paddles none had Hiawatha,
Paddles none he had or needed,
For his thoughts as paddles served him,
And his wishes served to guide him;
Swift or slow at will he glided,
Veered to right or left at pleasure."
The real Hiawatha, has little or nothing to do with Longfellow's
character. Longfellow based his poem on the legends surrounding the
Algonquian trickster Man-a-bo-zho. The only time I remember seeing that
name used was in W.T. Larned's "American Indian Fairy Tales,"
beautifully illustrated by John Rae.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22american...
(images of the book - which I think is still in print, with an added
story or two)
The story in that book was really about the prankster/dancer
Grasshopper (Pau-Puk-Keewiss) and Man-a-bo-zho's (very un-pranksterish
in this story) vengeance on him.
More on Manabozho:
http://www.whistlingshade.com/0203/hiawatha.html
(about why the name "Hiawatha" is used)
http://www.jdgbooks.com/outofprint/
(review of "Manabozho's Gifts")
http://www.crystalinks.com/iroquois.html
(From the above: "Hiawatha (also known as Ha-yo-went'-ha) who lived
around 1550, was variously a leader of the Onondaga and Mohawk nations
of Native Americans.")
http://www.answers.com/topic/hiawatha
"He is credited with founding the Iroquois Confederacy."
http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/07/22_steilm_hiaw...
(Pipestone, Minnesota stages Longfellow's "Hiawatha")
What's interesting about the above article is how kids today don't hear
about Longfellow's poem that much. This is not just because of a lack
of time in schools or changing tastes in the young, per se - many
critics think Longfellow was always too sentimental for the truly
well-read. My mother certainly never liked him, but she still wanted
and expected me to be aware of him, I think.
http://www.nps.gov/miss/maps/model/history/minnehaha_history.html
(Minnehaha Falls History)
http://www.troyrecord.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15525689&BRD=1170&PAG=...
(recent news article)
"The meter he used was based on a Finnish epic poem called the
Kalevala."
http://www.kaiku.com/kalevalainhiawatha.html
(Debate over how much of the poem is based on the Kalevala, plus
original reviews.)
And finally, if you like, here's a parody by Lewis Carroll, "Hiawatha's
Photographing."
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~bhs2u/carroll/hia.html
Lenona.
deb...@comcast.net
by his pals with, "Hiya, Watha!"
robertc...@yahoo.com
deb...@comcast.net wrote:
> Mad magazine did a parody of a guy named Melvin Watha, who was greeted
> by his pals with, "Hiya, Watha!"
I have tried more than once to read this poem, but after about thirty
lines the pronounced and unvarying meters start driving me crazy. I've
read enough about it to know the basic content, and I hope that one day
I will be able to get over my problems with the piece. But as of now.
Londfellow's most famous poem will have to wait.
mwestport
news:1131643757.2...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
> This is, at least, about more than one dead person, anyway.
>
>
>
> (Be sure to check the bottom of this post!)
>
>
> That is, today is the anniversary according to the guide at Henry
> Wadsworth Longfellow's house on Brattle St, Cambridge, MA, just a
> couple of miles from my apartment. (I could have sworn that one bio of
> Longfellow said the book was published in October of 1855, but other
> sources seem to back the guide up.)
{snip}
>
>
> Lenona.
>
Lenona, We may have passed one an other at My Auburn Cemetery then. I am
always tramping around there and usually stop by Mr. Longfellow to say
hello.
Preferred Evangeline myself. Longfellow is a case study in how someone can
go from a virtual superstar to near obscurity in a few decades. I doubt
most people under 25 have ever heard of him.
Mwestport
under a spreading chestnut tree somewhere in Somerville
leno...@yahoo.com
> Preferred Evangeline myself.
Did you know there are five silent movies based on that? Only one
(maybe) seems to have survived - the 1929 version with Dolores del Rio.
I'm still kicking myself for not seeing it when it was at the Brattle
Theatre - but I think it's on DVD now. Very high customer ratings! See
below.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0019856/
> Longfellow is a case study in how someone can
> go from a virtual superstar to near obscurity in a few decades. I doubt
> most people under 25 have ever heard of him.
>
> Mwestport
Well, I'd certainly hope they'd at least be familiar with the name
Hiawatha. For those who can't stand the metre of the poem, do check out
the Armstrong Sperry version "The Story of Hiawatha" - it was adapted
by Allen Chaffee and so about half the plot is in prose. There are only
about 50 pages and most of the space is taken up by the stunning
illustrations, which are both colored and black & white. It does not,
however, include quite a few stories from the original poem, such as
the one about Pau-Puk-Keewiss - or what happens to Minnehaha. I still
think it's worth owning and/or reading to kids. (I read Conrad
Richter's "The Light in the Forest," and, years later, I was certainly
surprised to find that one story - about the hunting of a bear - was
taken almost word for word from Longfellow! So too was the case with
"Child of the Evening Star" in "American Indian Fairy Tales" by W.T.
Larned.)
Oh, and assuming Louis Untermeyer's "Golden Treasury of Poetry" (for
children) stays in print (I can't imagine growing up without it,
myself, and I'm appalled the Cambridge Central Library doesn't have a
copy) there are quite a few differently styled poems by Longfellow in
that. When Longfellow's great-great nephew was in town to lecture on
his great-great uncle, I showed him that book, including the page that
says "Jemima" was supposedly written by Longfellow "in one of his more
facetious moments." The nephew had never heard that. ("Jemima" is the
poem that begins "There was a little girl/With a little curl/Right in
the middle of her forehead...." and goes on for two more verses!)
For the record, since Longfellow only had daughters, anyone with his
last name is not a direct descendant. (I did meet one or two of the
latter kind!)
Finally, I posted (three times) in this newsgroup about a friend of
Longfellow's whose 100th death anniversary was this September. Search
for it under my moniker and "macdonald," if you like. His fantasies, at
least, have never been out of print, even if he's not as well known as
his good friends Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll.
Lenona.