Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas

Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas by rothenberg, jerome. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780385012966.

In this gathering from many tribes, Jerome Rothenberg, whose TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED: A RANGE OF POETRIES FROM AFRICA, AMERICA, ASIA AND OCEANIA has been hailed as “both a deeply useful work book and an unequivocal delight”, reveals the great poetries and cultures what most interest and impresses him – as a later-day American and as a poet. Included here are the complete text of SHAKING THE PUMPKIN sacred curing songs from the Society of Mystic Animals, translated by Rothenberg and Richard Johnny John, a Seneca songmaker; Rothenberg’s working of a Navajo horse-song as an equivalent of an English sound poem; National Tarn’s version of a major section of the never-before-translated pre-Conquest Mayan play, “Rabinal Achi”; the complete text of a “sacred-clown” fertility drama of the Pueblo Indians; picture poems from the Cuna and Chippewa; two sections from Munro Edmonson’s reconstruction of the POPOL VUH as verse; Dennis Tedlock’s “total translation” of a Zuni Spoken narrative; a Book of Events (happenings); poems of the Netsilik Eskimos translated by Edward Field and Armand Schwerner; and selections from Tepehua thought-poems.