Will Kyselka
1951
Twenty years have passed since the publication of Martha Warren Beckwith?s translation and extended annotation of the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian cosmogonic and genealogical chant. When it appeared in 1951 she was celebrating her eightieth birthday. Except for one or two brief notes published during the remaining eight years of her life, the book about the Kumulipo was her last publication. It was the crown of over forty-five years of intensive research in the folklore of many parts of the world, but particularly of the Hawaiian Islands where she had grown up. The preparation of the book occupied most of her time after her retirement from Vassar College in 1938. There she had spent eighteen years as research professor in the Folklore Foundation established for her by her childhood friend, Annie M. Alexander, to whom the translation of the Kumulipo is dedicated. However, she had begun research on the chant before 1938. She was perhaps already studying it twenty years earlier when she began planning another major work, Hawaiian Mythology, which was published in 1940 (reissued in 1970 by the University of Hawaii Press). In that book she refers several times to the Kumulipo, and gives translations of parts of it as worked out with specific Hawaiian informants who also assisted in the final translation published in 1951. Hawaiian Mythology should be consulted in relation to the later book, for it thoroughly investigates in both the Hawaiian and a wider Polynesian setting many gods, goddesses, and cosmic personifications who also appear in the Kumulipo genealogy. To keep the poem in proper focus the later book usually describes them only tersely.
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