Unwritten Literature of Hawaii | Page 9

the rainy season, that began some time in October or November and was reckoned from the date when the Pleiades appeared in the East at sunset. _Maka-li'i_ was also the name of a month, by some reckoned as the first month of the year.]
[Footnote 6: _Maka-l��i_. The name of a famous mythological tree which had the power of attracting fish. It did not poison, but only bewitched or fascinated them. There were two trees bearing this name, one a male, the other a female, which both grew at a place in Hilo called Pali-uli. One of these, the female, was, according to tradition, carried from its root home to the fish ponds in Kailua, Oahu, for the purpose of attracting fish to the neighboring waters. The enterprise was eminently successful.]
[Footnote 7: _Po_. Literally night; the period in cosmogony when darkness and chaos reigned, before the affairs on earth had become settled under the rule of the gods. Here the word is used to indicate a period of remote mythologic antiquity. The use of the word _Po_ in the following verse reminds one of the French adage, "La nuit porte conseil."]
[Footnote 8: _Kok��a_. Another form for _kak��a_, to gird on the _pa-��_. (See _Pa-��_ song, pp. 51-53.)]
[Footnote 9: _Un��ki_. A word not given in the dictionary. The debut of an actor at the hula, after passing the _ai-lolo_ test and graduating from the school of the halau, a critical event.]
[Footnote 10: _Ha-��ke-��ke_. Equivalent to _ho-��ke-��ke_, an exhibition, to exhibit.]
[Footnote 11: _Ou-alii_. The Hawaiians seem to have lost the meaning of this word. The author has been at some pains to work it out somewhat conjecturally.]
[Footnote 12: _E Lono, e hu' ia, mai, etc_. The unelided form of the word _hu'_ would be _hui_. The final _i_ is dropped before the similar vowel of _ia_.]
[Footnote 13: _Kuk��lu o Kah��ki_. The pillars of Kahiki. The ancient Hawaiians supposed the starry heavens to be a solid dome supported by a wall or vertical?construction--_kukulu_--set up along the horizon. That section of the wall that stood over against Kahiki they termed _Kukulu o Kahiki_. Our geographical name Tahiti is of course from Kahiki, though it does not apply to the same region. After the close of what has been termed "the period of intercourse," which, came probably during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and during which the ancient Hawaiians voyaged to and fro between Hawaii and the lands of the South, geographical ideas became hazy and the term _Kahiki_ came to be applied to any foreign country.]
[Footnote 14: _��no-��i_. An old form of salutation, answering in general to the more modern word aloha, much used at the present time. _Ano-ai_ seems to have had a shade of meaning more nearly answering to our word "welcome." This is the first instance the author has met with of its use in poetry.]
[Page 18]
[Translation]
_A Prayer of Adulation to Laka_
In the forests, on the ridges
Of the mountains stands Laka;
Dwelling in the source of the mists.
Laka, mistress of the hula,
5 Has climbed the wooded haunts of the gods,
Altars hallowed by the sacrificial swine,
The head of the boar, the black boar of Kane.
A partner he with Laka;
Woman, she by strife gained rank in heaven.
10 That the root may grow from the stem,
That the young shoot may put forth and leaf,
Pushing up the fresh enfolded bud,
The scion-thrust bud and fruit toward the East,
Like the tree that bewitches the winter fish,