Olelo no'eau : Hawaiian proverbs & poetical sayings

“THIS EXTRAORDINARY COLLECTION of Hawaiian sayings—collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui—offers a unique opportunity to savor the wisdom, poetic beauty, and earthy humor of these finely crafted expressions. The sayings may be appreciated individually and collectively for their aesthetic, historic, and educational values. They reveal with each new reading ever deeper layers of meaning, giving understanding not only of Hawai'i and its people but of all humanity. Since the sayings carry the immediacy of the spoken word, considered to be the highest form of cultural expression in old Hawai'i, they bring us closer to the everyday thoughts and lives of the Hawaiians who created them. Taken together, the sayings offer a basis for an understanding of the essence and origins of traditional Hawaiian values.

The sayings may be categorized, in Western terms, as proverbs, aphorisms, didactic adages, jokes, riddles, epithets, lines from chants, etc., and they present a variety of literary techniques such as metaphor, analogy, allegory, personification, irony, pun, and repetition. It is worth noting, however, that the sayings were spoken, and that their meanings and purposes should not be assessed by the Western concepts of literary types and techniques.

The vast majority of the sayings were collected before the 1957 publication of the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian-English Dictionary, the standard for word combination and diacritic accenting in Hawaiian for more than twenty-five years. Many of the sayings used in the dictionary are from Kawena's collection and are now presented in their original form for the first time. The majority of these sayings were collected and translated between 1910 and i960. This was a period of evolving attitudes towards Hawaiian orthography, particularly concerning glottal stops and macrons. As a result of the many years of collecting, diacritic use in the manuscript takes various forms and lacks consistency. As a native speaker, Kawena was possibly uninterested in denoting, in rough manuscript, aspects of pronunciation that to her were natural and obvious. However, in materials she prepared for publication she was known to add diacritics, fully understanding that the declining number of native speakers was making the use of diacritics essential.

The sayings are given first in Hawaiian and followed, in most cases, by Kawena's literal or near-literal translation into English. The vast majority of the sayings are clarified through her explanation and commentary. A few of the sayings have no translation but are explained within the commentary, and a small percentage require no explanation beyond the translation.

The sayings are arranged alphabetically in Hawaiian. A conceptual arrangement, grouping into categories such as "Love" or "Domestic Life," would not have succeeded, as a single saying often speaks to many topics. In addition, some sayings have origins so remote or connotations so obscure that such categorizing would risk misinterpretation. Therefore, each saying is offered as a separate, individual distillation of thought. Explanations beyond those of the author are left to the reader's understanding and research.” -- Preface