Dan Smith
"Hiawatha:" the poem and the parody
The point of this post is really the parody. I'm curious to see if non-native speakers will be able to see why "The Modern Hiawatha," below, is funny.
The American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote "The Song of Hiawatha" in 1855. In the original edition it is 296 pages long. It's one of his major works. It's an epic poem. It is about the lives and legends of Native Americans, and was based on the researches of an ethnographer. It's a very serious work.
Longfellow wrote it in the same meter (rhythm) as the great Finnish epic, the Kalevala. The meter is called "trochaic tetrameter." The meter sounds like a perfectly even drum-beat. It goes "TUH-tuh-TUH-tuh, TUH-tuh-TUH-tuh, TUH-tuh-TUH-tuh, TUH-tuh-TUH-tuh"--for 296 pages. It is in "blank verse" (the lines do not rhyme).
Here is a short extract from the real "Song of Hiawatha:"
He had mittens, Minjekahwun,
Magic mittens made of deer-skin;
When upon his hands he wore them,
He could smite the rocks asunder,
He could grind them into powder.
He had moccasins enchanted,
Magic moccasins of deer-skin;
When he bound them round his ankles,
When upon his feet he tied them,
At each stride a mile he measured!
From its day of publication, it was thought a bit pretentious. It was very much admired by some critics and the public; but a lot of people mocked it, in particular the meter, which is natural to Finnish, but in English is annoying when it goes for many pages with no change or variation. In the papers, joking writers, sometime wrote their mocking items, using Hiawatha's rhythm, used the meter of the Eddas; but they did not break the lines up, so it looked like normal writing, looked like prose and not a poem, and it took a little reading for the reader to discover what the writer had been up to.
Just one year later, in 1856, a parody appeared, "The Song of Milkanwatha" (i.e. "milk-and-water.") The parody is 76 pages long! A part of this parody--with some changes and improvements by anonymous authors--became almost as famous as Longfellow's poem! Here is the parody:
"The Modern Hiawatha"
He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That ’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.
(For the curious, the original 1856 version was:
From the squirrel-skin, Marcosset
Made some mittens for our hero,
Mittens with the fur-side inside,
With the fur-side next his fingers,
So's to keep the hand warm inside;
That was why she put the fur-side--
Why she put the fur-side inside.)
2019年3月19日 18:10
评论 · 2
This is hilarious, Dan. Reading it feels like going around in circles, too much "side" and too little is said. It's exaggerated, obviously, but the original version does sound quite parodiable.
2019年3月19日
It's really funny. We learned "Song of Hiawatha" at school :)
2019年3月19日
