Translated & arranged by Richard Dauenhauer after Father Julius Jetté, S.J.
[The riddle in verbal culture is part of the stock-in-trade of
academic folklore, but its relation to the poetic image has rarely been
explored until recently. The workings
presented here were originally published in The
Riddle and Poetry Handbook, developed by Richard Dauenhauer (1942-2014) as a project of
the Alaska Native Education Board in Anchorage ,
Alaska
In working with
Father Julius Jetté’s 1913 notes Dauenhauer set the riddles up as two-part
antiphonal texts, the initial image or utterance clarified or deepened by the
utterance that followed. Of the mind at
work here, as well as its endangerment, Dauenhauer wrote further: “The riddle
in Jetté exemplify the poetic use of everyday language and the imaginative
juxtaposition of everydayimages, of seeing something in terms of something
else, and verbalizing that picture through manipulation of the wonderful and indefinite
potential of language. With suppression
and eradication of Native Alaskan intellectual traditions, and with the
diminished possibilities of transmitting oral tradition because of language
loss among the younger generations, a situation has developed in which even the
average fluent speaker of Koyukon – through no fault of his or her own – is no
longer familiar with riddles and riddle style.”
The situation,
since Dauenhauer wrote this in the late 1970s, may still be open to question.
(J.R.)]
A selection of the riddle-poems, as first published by Dennis
Tedlock and myself in Alcheringa and
scheduled for publication in the expanded Technicians
of the Sacred, follows.
****
Like a spruce tree
lying on the ground:
the back-hand
of the bear.
.
I drag my shovel
on the trail:
a beaver.
.
Water dripping
from an ice-spear tip:
water dripping
from the beaver's nose.
.
Like bones
piled up in the stream bed:
sticks
the beaver gnaws.
.
Flying upward,
ringing bells in silence:
the butterfly.
.
Muddy-light
dark-fresh
like two streams merging:
eagle feet.
.
At the tip it's
dipping in ashes:
ermine tail.
.
Faraway, a
fire flaring up:
red fox tail.
.
Small dots
on the skyline:
when the birds return.
.
As if the stream bed
were hacked up with a knife:
footprints of the swans
and geese.
.
Someone's throwing
sparks in the air:
plucking the reddish feathers
of the grouse.
.
It scatters little wood crumbs
from the trees:
a roosting grouse, eating.
.
It looks like a flint:
the louse.
.
Round and shiny
at the end of my spruce bough:
Lynx feet
or the great gray owl.
.
It really snowed hard
in opposite directions
on my head:
a mountain sheep.
.
At the water hole
the ice-spear
trembles in the current:
a swimming otter's tail.
.
Like forest branches
fluffing in the wind:
the great gray
owl ears.
.
Ptarmigan bills:
like bits of charcoal
scattered on the snow.
.
We come upstream
in red canoes:
the salmon.
.
Like a water plant:
floating salmon guts.
.
Smoke-like
it spreads out in the water:
butchered salmon blood.
.
The hilltop trail
running close beside me:
a thing on which
the wolf has peed.
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