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Palgrave Studies in Translating and
Interpreting

Series Editor
Margaret Rogers
School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

This series examines the crucial role which translation and interpreting
in their myriad forms play at all levels of communication in today’s
world, from the local to the global. Whilst this role is being increasingly
recognised in some quarters (for example, through European Union
legislation), in others it remains controversial for economic, political
and social reasons. The rapidly changing landscape of translation and
interpreting practice is accompanied by equally challenging
developments in their academic study, often in an interdisciplinary
framework and increasingly reflecting commonalities between what
were once considered to be separate disciplines. The books in this
series address specific issues in both translation and interpreting with
the aim not only of charting but also of shaping the discipline with
respect to contemporary practice and research.
Douglas Robinson

The Experimental Translator

Douglas Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

ISSN 2947-5740 e-ISSN 2947-5759

Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting
ISBN 978-3-031-17940-2 e-ISBN 978-3-031-17941-9
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17941-9

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Preface
1
My title, The Experimental Translator, is a provocation, of course—but
not an unprecedented one. In “Where Is My Desire?” Chantal Wright
(2020) launched a similar provocation, insisting that “Translation
needs to be sexier. It needs to be more creative, more experimental; it
needs an avant-garde. It needs to jam, and see what comes out in the
wash.”
I have taken these words to heart—not only here in this book but in
the experimental translations that energize it.
Chantal Wright also directed me to Lily Robert-Foley’s (2020)
article “The Politics of Experimental Translation,” which draws on a
half-century or more of translational experiments, and to the onslaught
of monographs on this topic from Clive Scott, including at least Literary
Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (2012a), Translating the
Perception of Text (2012b), and The Work of Literary Translation
(2018), which harks back to the experimental writing of Apollinaire
and Mallarmé.
Those works might arguably impart a kind of inevitability to my
topic and title—even a kind of finality, as in what else could there
possibly be to say?
But of course despite these provocations, “translation” at large in
society remains at once subservient and sacrosanct. More precisely, the
source text remains sacrosanct in its inimitable brilliance and what
remains sacrosanct in its translation is only the subservient
preservation (though with some unfortunate diminishment, sigh) of
that brilliance. The translation is the handmaiden to brilliance; it has no
claim to brilliance.

2
That last paragraph is of course the quasi-religious mythos of
translation that the “experimental” provocateurs assault—and that
mythos, precisely because it protects the sanctity of the great (literary)
work of art, is itself well-protected.
 In a 2014 review of Scott (2012a, b), for example, Adam Piette offers
a somewhat grudging acceptance of the inventive experimentality that
Scott champions, only pausing briefly to call this or that experimental
translation “an extraordinary mélange of text, environmental baggage,
and white noise” (425) or “a mess” (427)1 and then in his final
paragraph gets right down to it:

This brings me to the crux of my problem with the two books:

the concept “experimental,” though brave, colorful, theoretically
lively, liberating in and of itself, is used in practice to “forget” the
original in ways that do not foreground the textual,
performative, or environmental processes/contexts of
production so much as point towards the translator as master-
juggler. (427)

That’s the crime: “‘forget[ting]’ the original.” Experimental

translation as foregrounding the brilliance not of the source text but of
“the translator as master-juggler.”
He goes on: “This is not narcissistic, necessarily, but it takes a while
to task oneself, let us say, not to think of Harold Bloom when the
originals are defaced, scribbled over, and twisted from their original
trajectories” (427). Presumably what he means there by “Harold
Bloom” is not the crabby old man resentfully bemoaning the usurpation
of white male privilege by feminists and multiculturalists in The
Western Canon (Bloom 1994; see Robinson 2017d: Chapter 2) but the
two anxiously influential little books of the mid-1970s, The Anxiety of
Influence (1973) and A Map of Misprision (1975).
But see Sections 24–26 of Chapter 2 and 1–4 of Chapter 3, below, for
a close look at Jonathan Lethem’s (2007) retort to Bloom, “The Ecstasy
of Influence”—not to mention the ἔκστασιν ἄ γει(ν)/ékstasin ágei(n)
“driving us out of ourselves” of Longinus on the sublime. As I argue in
“Translator, Touretter: Avant-Garde Translation and the Touretter
Sublime” (Robinson Unpub.) that “ecstatic” experience of being driven
out of oneself is one of the goals of the avant-garde—and of course the
anxiety of that ecstasy that more conservative readers feel helps power
the backlash against experimental translation.
3
A little more of that backlash from Piette:

Too much commentary on the translation procedure, and too

little sensitivity to the speech act of the original, well, God knows
the majority of books on translation theory are guilty of that. Yet
here, the darker sides to experimental reworking of the speech
of the other are too often glided over towards a celebratory
model for the radical reworkings. (427)

The other is other; the self is the self. Each is a separate monad that
must be kept inviolate—except, of course, when the self is a translator.
Then that self must relinquish the impulse to be respected as an
inviolate other by either the source author or the target reader. The
translator’s task is to subsume the self in the wonderfulness of the
other. The idea that the translator’s “radical reworkings” might be
celebrated as “the other,” even and especially by those restless source
authors who, like Jonathan Lethem, love precisely the ecstatic
experience of being driven out of themselves, is simply unavailable to
Piette. Any kind of deviation from the source text is “the darker side”:

It is characteristic that it is Merleau-Ponty who is the guardian

spirit of the transactions, for instance, with his upbeat ecstatic
sense of the cheerful, sensual interplay of percipient, object, and
perceptual world; and not, say, Freud, who might have seen, in
some of the inkblot scribbling overwriting manner, symptoms of
endopsychic aggrandissement. Or perhaps signs of what Sartre
would analyse under the banner of the factitious transcendence
of mauvaise foi. Mother tongues tempt the mind to do much
harm to father-texts. (427)

There it is: the Freudian family romance, or what Deleuze and

Guattari called the daddy-mommy-me. As Jacques Lacan insists, of
course, the daddy is the source and embodiment of the No of the Law:
do not harm the father-text! And the mommy is a mess: a mélange of
imaginary anxiety, cannibalistic impulses to devour and excrete the
child,2 desires to possess the child as a symbolic penis, unrepresentable
chaos—and, why not, white noise as well. The translator too, in Piette’s
translational take on that romance, must renounce the mother (tongue)
and adhere to the father-text’s prohibitory law.

4
In The Work of Literary Translation Scott offers this account of his
theorizations and practice of experimental translation over the
previous decade:

Translation is an exploration, palpation and inscription into the

source text (ST), of readerly consciousness, and this involves not
only finding a form adequate to that consciousness – a search
which, for me, covers the gamut from free verse (Scott 2000), in
the wake of Yves Bonnefoy’s practice, to different kinds of
tabular and multi-medial disposition—but also wresting
translation from the monopoly of the monoglot reader (with its
narrow constraints of fidelity and reliability) and retrieving it
for a polyglot reader, able to read the ST. (2018: 2)

Noting the serendipitous convergence between his title The Work of

Literary Translation and Derek Attridge’s (2015) The Work of
Literature, he also draws attention to the divergences:

What is more properly different is the fact that translation

requires us to go beyond the “willed/active passivity” or
“exposure” (Attridge 2015, 2–4) of reception, and to reinvent the
ST’s inventiveness, knowing that it cannot be the same, that we
must capture it in a new dimension, or frankly displace or
relocate it. Besides, the notions of inventiveness and the other
will themselves have another dimension: as translators, our
encounter with a foreign language has nothing to do with
‘pleasurable exoticism’, but with a profound perceptual
otherness; we would be unwise to call this particular ‘otherness’
cultural, since we so easily inhabit it, more acutely perhaps than
native speakers. (2)
 Unlike Attridge’s grounding in source texts that have accrued the
institutional but deeply affective “sacrality” that the culture (and Piette
along with it) assigns to them, with implicit hierarchies of “good” and
“bad” reading and readers, too, Scott underscores the mutability that
translation inevitably brings to literature:

Translation is unavoidably transformative, restores literary

making to flux, melting or diversifying categorial boundaries,
reinventing the processes of reading, expecting that each new
version of a ST will re-position us, throwing into question the
methods and knowledges that institutional practice might
regard as maximally appropriate. Where, for Attridge, it is “in
responding to the handling of form that the reader of a literary
work brings it into being as literature” (Attridge 2015, 267),
translation is, for me, in its search for literariness, hostile to
achieved form and is concerned with composing the
decomposition of the ST, by metamorphosis and/or by montage
…, that is, by continuous formal variation and/or by the repeated
disaggregation of form into assembled, volatile fragments. (3)

5
One of Scott’s practical and theoretical orientations to translation that
make the translation strategies he recommends especially disorienting
entails an attention not just to the source text but to the situatedness of
both the source text and the translation in the world(s) outside the text:
“translation should be instrumental in deepening the reader’s
environmental engagement, in three senses: in a fuller inhabitation of
the environment presented by the ST; in the better understanding of
language itself as an ecology; and in doing proper justice to the
environment, the ‘outside world’, of the act of reading” (10). This
expanded enactivity of the texts and their various writers and readers,
including the translator, drives many of the experimental translation
strategies that Scott recommends:
Writing handwritten reading/reciting performance notes into the
margins (rather like the ones the Masoretes did with the edition of
the Hebrew Bible that Henri Meschonnic places at the core of his
 experimental translations3), especially to guide the experience of
intratextual and extratextual rhythms
Playing with typography, especially disruptive changes in font size
throughout individual words and sentences, irregular capitalizations
and spacings, columnar layouts
Collaging/montaging translated passages with related news items,
photographs, and other cross-media insertions (Scott 2012a: 187–
196 is a closing homage to Malcolm Bowie, who cultivated such
devices)
“Overprinting,” meaning doing several translations that highlight
different aspects of the text and its environment and then
superimposing them on top of one another
Deploying Letterist and Situationist psychogeographies to set up
personal connections among routes through the city, including
acoustic effects
“This is all, finally,” Scott (2018: 12) writes, “to promote not a
postmodern version of translation but the idea that translation is
constitutionally postmodern.”
I would add that that might be true in one of the two different ways
(or possibly both): either the postmodern “constitutionality” of
translation—the “blend of metamorphosis and montage as the
appropriate aesthetic for translation” (11)—is the experimental
translator’s reaction-formation against the carceral subservient-
handmaiden ethos of traditional translation or, as no doubt Scott would
prefer, the subservient-handmaiden ethos of traditional translation
—“its habit of privileging qualities of formal stability, organicity and
wholeness” (11)—is hegemonic society’s reaction-formation against
the intrinsic mutability of translation and other forms of
translationality (see Robinson 2017e).

6
Lily Robert-Foley (2020) is a member of Outranspo (Ouvroir de
Translation Potencial, “workshop of potential translation,”
outranspo.com), founded in 2012 as the translational offshoot of Oulipo
(Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, “workshop of potential literature,”
oulipo.net), the experimental group founded in 1960 by Raymond
Queneau and François Le Lionnais. (Italo Calvino, whose If on a winter’s
night a traveler figures centrally in the Introduction, was a member of
Oulipo, and translated Queneau into Italian in 1967 and 1985.)
Robert-Foley defines experimental translation oppositionally, as
“any translation practice that opposes itself to translational norms,” or
“mistranslations of a sort” (401), and gives a long list of examples (the
parenthetical citations with just page numbers in the low 400s are to
Robert-Foley (2020); those with author surname and year are
examples of Robert-Foley’s categories):
“keeping too close to the original …” (401; the radical literalism of
Hö lderlin’s Pindar and Sophocles; see the Introduction to this book,
Sections 9 and 29, but also Robinson 2022d)
“… or straying too far” (401–402; Mouré 2004; Brown 2011)
“mistaking the what or the how of what is to be translated” (402;
Dworkin 2008)
“translations that tamper with the very idea of what is considered a
signifying unit” (402; “Outranspo’s ‘microtranslations’ break down
individual words and translate their parts, whereas ‘exotranslation’
elaborates upon them” [402n4])
translations “that divert from common conceptions of the intended
meaning of a text” (402; metonymic translations like Barbour and
Scobie (1981), Outranspo’s hommeauxtranslations)
translations that “translate one dimension of the text but not another,
such as the sound …” (402; homophonic translations, for which see
the Introduction of this book, Section 11; “Outranspo’s
‘sonotraductions’ and traduit partouzes” [402n6], Stalling 2011,
“literal translations of Chinese transliterations in English language
learning manuals back into English” [402n6]) “… or the shape” (402;
Artozqui 2017)
translations that “vary in quantity” (402; Efthymiades 2016; Bergvall
2005):
“translating one word as many (beyond reason)” (402; Vilgrain
2001)
“or many words as one (beyond reason)” (402; no examples)
translations that change:
“mediums” (402; Barokka 2016)
“registers, genres, text type” (402; Pester 2016)
 “lexical field” (402–403; “Eliana Vicari’s unpublished
Arcimboldo translations, which translate an extract from Jacques
Roubaud’s la Belle Hortense (Paris: Editions Ramsay 1985), changing
the lexical field of one extended metaphor (Mme Groichant as
patisserie) for others: Mme Groichant as fruit, Mme Groichant as
meat, as fish, etc.” [403n12])
translations that “create a new made-up language” (403; Mouré
2017; Gorman 2009, Outranspo’s neotranslation)
translations that “travel backwards or forwards in time” (403; Terry
2014; Doris 2000a)
translations that “translate between orality and writing” (403; Okara
1964; Griswald 2016)
“translations that use (in the wrong way) external tools such as …”
“… the Internet …” (403; Skoulding 2013)
“… automatic translation generators …” (403; “Annie
Abrahams’s performance with Martina Rusham, Jana Wilcoxen and
Chantal van Mourik What do you mean? in which each author wrote
on a shared textpad that was then Google translated into Slovenian,
fed into Alpineon’s TTS software, and diffused live. The sound
recording (or what could be understood of it) was then transcribed
by Milena Gros. The resulting text was then retranslated back into
English to give the poem: ‘You have to accept (a FEW times). New
language,’” published in Abrahams 2014; Hazzard 2016, “which uses
Google translate to create new poems from Russian from his hacked
Twitter Feed” [403n17]; see also Chapter 2 Section 15 in this book)
translations that “employ filters, physical material, substances, or
other devices (like …)” (403)
“… a shower …” (403; Cobb et al. 2003, translating Zhuangzi
“while listening to the text over the sound of a shower running, by
looking at it through smeared glass, not looking at the page while
writing, hearing it from a cell phone, etc.” [403n18])
“… or a shotgun …” (403; Hawkey 2017)
translations as
“cut-ups” (403; Doris 2000b)
“collages” (403; Allen 2016; see also Chapter 3 in this book)
“pastiches, combining translations or languages together”
(403; Achebe 1964; Bergvall 2011)
 translations that “appropriate, reappropriate, or disappropriate”
(403–404; no examples)
translations that translate:
“one language into many” (404; “The Outranspian ‘Renga-O’
(2017) http://​www.​outranspo.​com/​renga-o-le-renga-revu-par-
loutranspo/​[accessed April 13, 2022] was initiated by Camille
Bloomfield and used Outranspian constraints to translate individual
quatrains written by one Outranspian and then passed round in a
circle, translated into different languages with each pass in the circle
http://​www.​outranspo.​com/​renga-o-le-renga-revu-par-loutranspo/​
)” [404n23])
“many languages into one” (404; “Outranspo’s ‘Cazé
translation: to retranslate a text back and forth between the source
language and other languages until the final translation corresponds
exactly to an existing text from a different author in the original
source-language. The name of this procedure comes from Antoine
Cazé, who envisioned this utopic translation procedure’ (from
Outranspo, ‘Classifications’)” [404n24])
“playful self-translations” (404; Stephens 2006; Léotin 2013)
“bilingual genesis” (404; Lassaque 2013)
translations that “translate texts that don’t exist” (404; “also known
as pseudotranslations, of which Don Quixote is a well-known
example” [404n27]; see also Chapter 5 Sections 9–18 in this book)
“models of constraints, games, or text generators that can be applied
time and time again” (404; Outranspo 2020)
translations as “singular transformations of a specific text” (404;
Robert-Foley 2013, 2016)
“This list,” Robert-Foley adds, “is by no means exhaustive, and
indeed, I have not tried to make it so, as experimentation summons
invention and escapes beyond limits” (404). And indeed she goes on to
extend the list without specific examples:

They [experimental translations] can use writing as a form of

translation, translation as a form of reading, reading as a form of
writing, writing as a form of reading, reading as a form of
translation, or translation as a form of writing (or translation as
a form of dance, music, game, cuisine, knitting, itinerary … or the
 inverse, ad infinitum). They use proliferation, multiplication,
erasure, deviation, détournement, distortion, recreation,
rewriting, adaptation, localization, relocalization, commentary,
interpolation, cannibalism, recombination, ekphrasis, calque,
paraphrase, illegibility, lyric re-embodiment, and footnote …
(404)

7
This book, The Experimental Translator, is far less ambitious than
Outranspo. It is not a tour de force. In the list I took from Robert-Foley
you will have noticed a few references to my chapters, as some of the
experimental translation strategies on her list do appear here: the use
of “automatic translation generators” in Chapter 2, collage translation
in Chapter 3, and pseudotranslations in Chapter 5.
My goal, however, is different: not to cover the incredibly inventive
field of experimental translation but to zoom in on a few experiments
and think a little more deeply about them. In that sense my book is
more like Clive Scott’s work—though as far as I’m aware none of my
experiments overlap with his. My exploration of pseudotranslation in
Chapter 5 is really focused more on play with heteronyms, and thus
“heterotranslation,” than it is on the simple absence of a source text. My
exploration of smuggling translation in Chapter 4 to my mind is totally
new: it links up with no other experimental translation that I know of.
The closest I veer to Scott is in Chapter 3: he too writes of collage
techniques. Where he is interested in collaging and montaging non-
collage source texts, however, I’m interested in footnoting collage
novels—as in the very last word of the late quotation from Robert-Foley
in Section 6. Chapter 2 sets up a whole science fiction universe of
experimental hypercyborg translation. And the introductory first
chapter, next, well—it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.
I’m not trying to claim any kind of superiority here. The worlds of
Clive Scott and Outranspo are weirdly wonderful, and I am
overwhelmingly indebted to them. All I’m saying, to quote Adam Piette
(2014: 425) again, is that “If that sounds mysterious, then you have not,
friend, seen anything yet.”
Douglas Robinson
Shenzhen, China
Praise for The Experimental Translator
“Translation has rarely been this irreverent, and even more rarely been
this much fun. In a deft interweaving of complex notions articulated
with great clarity, and wonderfully fluid storytelling, Robinson took me
on one of the most delightful, translationally geeky romps of my
research career. But this is serious fun. Using practice-based research
translation techniques that prey and play on texts, Robinson gives us
deep readings of important literary texts, known and unknown, while
blowing the lid off of contemporary Western culture’s most deeply held
presuppositions about what a translation is supposed to be and do,
opening to new worlds of potential.”
—Lily Robert-Foley, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France
“This is a thoroughly engaging book that makes a compelling
argument for experimentalism in translation. It is written with masterly
command of the topic, both in terms of theory and practice, and
displays the highest level of scholarship. It is a refreshingly innovative
contribution to the current field of translation studies and fills a gap in
the scholarship regarding the recognition of experimental translation
as a subject of scholarly study in its own right.”
—Alexandra Lukes, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Contents
1 Introduction:​Provocations
2 The (Hyper)Cyborg Translator
3 The Collage Translator
4 The Smuggler Translator
5 The Heteronymous Translator
6 Conclusion:​Between Originality and Derivativity
References
Footnotes
1 In another place Piette illustrates “texting into the performance poem speech
collected from the event itself” with two parenthetical examples, a hierarchical
territorialization and a taboo profanation: “(‘Don’t push me’, or ‘with cream?’
muscling into the sacred space of the original poem)” (2014: 426). Those “muscles”
are patently the muscles of the mundane, the profane space of ordinary colloquial
transactions that have no business in the “sacred space” of art.

2 For the “cannibalistic” metaphor/theory of translation coming out of Brazil, see

Vieira (1994, 1999).

3 For discussion of Meschonnic’s translation methods and theories in the context of

avant-garde translation, see Robinson (Unpub.: Chapter 3).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
D. Robinson, The Experimental Translator, Palgrave Studies in Translating and
Interpreting
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17941-9_1

1. Introduction: Provocations
Douglas Robinson1
(1) Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

Postmodern Provocation: Italo Calvino and the Experimental

Translator

1
In 1979 Italo Calvino published his postmodern experiment Se una
notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. It’s not clear that it should be called a
novel, because one of the things it is is an all-fronts assault on the genre
of the novel; but then the novel has always been a hotbed of
experimentation, from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in the third
and fourth decades of the sixteenth century and Cervantes’ Don Quixote
in the first two decades of the seventeenth to postmodernists like
Calvino and Thomas Pynchon.
Calvino begins in Chapter 1 by creating a narrative frame in the
second person, addressed to “you,” the Reader. The second-person
address is clever, but not a radical innovation; it’s also metafictional, an
account of how “you” have just bought Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a
winter’s night a traveler and are looking forward to reading it. When
you turn the page to what looks like a new chapter, but is simply titled
“If on a winter’s night a traveler” without a chapter number, it’s even
more metafictional: rather than a simple narrative it’s the narratorial
“I” addressing the lectorial “you” in a series of explorations of how a
narrator involves a reader in a story. In one sense it is set in a
viaggiatore “traveler” context—a train station—but in another sense it
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Title: The daughter of the dawn

A realistic story of Maori magic

Author: William Reginald Hodder

Illustrator: Harold Piffard

Release date: April 1, 2024 [eBook #73312]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1903

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The Daughter of
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Boston
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[COPYRIGHT.]
Copyright, 1903
By L. C. Page & Company
(INCORPORATED)

All rights reserved

Published July, 1903

 [DEDICATION.]
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
TO AN AGED PAIR
WHO DWELL AT TARANAKI’S BASE,
THEIR HAIR AS WHITE
THEIR LIVES AS PURE
AS THE SNOW ON TARANAKI’S SUMMIT.
 CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
WANAKI’S FOREWORD
I. A SPLENDID MADMAN
II. THE AGED CHIEF
III. A SECRET OF ANCIENT NIGHT
IV. THE HAUNTED REGION
V. ON THE GREAT TAPU
VI. NGARAKI—CHIEF AND TOHUNGA
VII. THE INTERIOR OF THE TEMPLE OF HIA
VIII. THE VILE TOHUNGAS OF THE PIT
IX. NGARAKI THE FIERCE
X. KAHIKATEA AND HIS STRANGE BELIEF
XI. THE SEARCH FOR ‘THE LITTLE MAIDEN’
XII. THE MAN-WHO-HAD-FORGOTTEN
XIII. CRYSTAL GREY
XIV. THE CHIEF OF THE VILE TOHUNGAS
XV. THE DARKNESS PUTS FORTH A TENTACLE
XVI. WHICH REVEALS THE WAY OF THE SORCERER
XVII. LOVE AT SECOND SIGHT
XVIII. TE MAKAWAWA IS STARTLED
XIX. THE DREAD MAKUTU
XX. CRYSTAL LOVES KAHIKATEA, WHO LOVES HINAURI
XXI. CRYSTAL AND HINAURI MEET
XXII. THE TALISMAN
XXIII. THE DAUGHTER OF THE DAWN
XXIV. ZUN THE TERRIBLE
XXV. THE SERVANT OF THE BROTHERHOOD OF HUO
XXVI. NGARAKI’S HOUR OF TRIUMPH
XXVII. THE GIANTS CLOSE THEIR TEMPLE
XXVIII. FAREWELL
CONCLUSION
ENDNOTES
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
His long figure was suspended above the dark abyss
“This, O Pakehas, was the legend given me by my father”
The light sank lower and showed more. Then to my astonished eyes
was unveiled, inch by inch from the darkness, the massive
granite brows of a gigantic head
She seated herself sideways on the hammock, while I resumed my
wicker chair, and told again the story which I had narrated to her
father
The flash came, and the sight it revealed I shall never forget. There
stood Crystal in the path before me, draped in her night
garments
Another twist and he rolled right across it, his hair and beard frizzling
in the flame
At that instant the expected sun ray burst in, and the dazzling beauty
of the Daughter of the Dawn was revealed
The second Maori that entered with axe upraised had his head cut
clean off by the first sweeping back stroke
I raised the tube, took careful aim, and puffed the dart
He rocked it backwards and forwards until at last he raised it on its
side, and there, with a firm hand, he held it poised upon the very
brink
Kahikatea stood like a bronze statue, with one arm stretched out. In
the hand of that arm was the throat of the wizard, whose body
hung from it, limp and lifeless
With hands crossed upon her bosom, and her shrouding hair drawn
over her like the curtains of the night, Hinauri lay upon the pyre
 INTRODUCTION.
The way in which the record of Wanaki, which it has been my
compulsory task to edit, was placed in my hands forms not the least
remarkable episode between these covers. On a certain night two
months ago I was sitting in my library in Harley Street, writing. It was
late, and I could hear the tinkling of many little bells in the street as
the cabs brought home the gay theatre-goers. As I wrote on, the
tinkling of these little bells grew to a merry chorus, yet it did not
disturb me: I was used to it. But the night advanced, and the bells
seemed to grow tired as the cabs rolled by less frequently. Then
gradually I began to feel that a disturbing element was creeping in
between me and my work. Indefinable at first, this feeling grew, until
at last I recognised it as a vague expectancy, and, as each cab
passed, I caught myself listening to hear if it would stop at the street
door. This struck me as being a very absurd state of mind, for no one
was due, and a patient would hardly call at that time of night. Yet the
strange feeling of expecting someone grew upon me at such a rate
that I put down my pen and listened in spite of myself as the cabs
with the tinkling bells went by. At last, after a longer interval than
usual, my ears fastened upon the bells of a vehicle that seemed to
be approaching from beyond the horizon. They drew near rapidly,
and the absurd feeling of expecting someone grew still more intense.
Laughing at the stupidity of it, I rose from my chair and walked to and
fro, wondering what had happened to my nerves, usually so strong.
Suddenly I stood still. The rapid motion of the horse’s hoofs was
slacking down. Would the cab pull up at the street door? Of course
not—it would pass. It had almost done so when there was the sound
of the scraping hoofs of a horse suddenly reined in, a violent
agitation of the little bells, and then the cab drew up at the street
door. I heard a ring at the bell, and then sat down in my chair to
wonder what this late visitor wanted, and, above all, to ask myself
again and again how I could account for my extraordinary feeling of
expecting someone who was unexpected, and yet had arrived. While
I was thus engaged my man Gapper came in with a face that
announced the end of the world, and spoke in a voice which
betrayed, in the same trembling breath, an overwhelming desire to
impart news and a suffocating fear of being heard.
“There’s a strange man in the ’all, sir,” he said, “as wants to see
you. I gave ’im to understand, sir, as you wouldn’t hever see no one
after eleving, but ’e looks at me ’ard and says quiet like, ‘You will do
as I tell you,’ ’e says.”
“What is he like?” I asked.
“Well, ’e looks to me as hif ’e ’ad just come ’ome from a fancy-
dress ball. ’E’s got feathers in ’is ’air and drorin’s on ’is face, and a
sort of long fur cloak and—but there it is, sir, I can’t describe ’im; ’e’s
a-standin’ there hin the ’all just as if the ’ole place belonged to ’im.
Shall I ask him to go away?”
Gapper’s knees were knocking together. I saw that he was morally
incapable of asking this strange visitor to go. I myself felt slightly
unstrung, and it may have been my fear of showing this that
prompted me to say abruptly:
“Show him in, Gapper; I expect it’s some friend playing a joke
upon me. At all events I will see him.”
Evidently relieved by these words, my man retired, and presently,
with a humility born of a fresh access of fear, ushered in my visitor.
He then retreated nimbly and closed the door behind him.
As the stranger stood in the centre of the room I rose from my seat
in unfeigned astonishment. Well might Gapper have thought that he
had just returned from a fancy-dress ball, except for the simple, and
to me obvious, fact that he was not an impersonation at all, but the
genuine thing. In fact, my visitor, who had been, so to speak,
heralded by my inexplicable sensations, was a tall and stately Maori
chief, dressed in a long robe or war-cloak of dog’s hair, which fell
almost to his sandalled feet. He had both spear and meré, and in his
hair were the white-tipped feathers of the huia. He was young,
almost handsome, and his face was tatooed in a way that denoted
an exalted rank, while in his fierce black eyes, in his noble bearing,
in his profound composure as he waited for me to speak, one might
have read his right to lead men, or else to drive them before him. He
seemed to have come right out of the far King Country into my library
at one stride, so uncivilised was his appearance. My surprise was
immediately giving way to a feeling, half of admiration, half of fear,
for, after my unwonted sensations preceding his arrival, I was
assailed with the thought that there was a mysterious power about
the man—a thought materially strengthened by his perfect ease and
conscious dignity.
“May I ask your name?” I said with a brave attempt to appear
complaisant.
“I am Aké Aké,” he replied, speaking in good English; “Aké Aké
Rangitane, the son of Ngaraki, who was the son of Te Makawawa,
who was the son of——, but O man of another race, who is to do my
bidding, I will not relate to you my ancestry. It would take many
moons to do that; many thousand generation boards would not
contain it, for lo! it stretches back to a far-off age of which your wise
men know nothing. O Pakeha, the blood of the Great River of
Heaven, which flowed down from the skies before the darkness of
ancient night fell upon the earth, runs in my veins.”
I looked at him narrowly. There was no denying that his aspect
was that of a man whose blood knew well its own unbroken channel
through the ages. Something in his eyes, something more in his
stately aspect, and a very great deal in the fierce, sudden nature
hidden beneath his utter serenity, constrained me to take him
solemnly.
“You come to me in a strange way, Aké Aké,” I said; “like a man
from another world. Tell me why you have come, and what it is you
want of me.”
Instantly he awoke from his apathy, and his eyes quickened with
the fire that had been slumbering.
“Hearken, then, O man of another land, and I will tell you why I
have come. The Great Tohungas of the Earth spoke to me in my
sleep and said, ‘Aké Aké, thou art the last of our ancient blood; the
temple of the ages is closed for ever and needs no longer a guardian
priest to keep its ancient secrets; therefore thou must withdraw into
the sky, leaving no son behind thee. But thy last act is under our
guidance. Seek out the record of one Wanaki, the “Pakeha Maori,”
and take it beyond the great Ocean of Kiwa to the land of the mighty
King who rules the whole world. There give it to the man whose face
thou hast seen in dreams, and to whom we will guide thee. Bid him
make a book of this record, so that, though thy race is fading away,
all knowledge of its secrets may not die with thee.’ I followed the
word of the Great Tohungas, and when I reached this great city I was
taught your name and the name of your abode. Then, to-night I
discarded my pakeha garments, dressed myself as becomes a Maori
chief, and came to find you. Without doubt I have been guided aright,
for your face is the face that I saw in my dreams.”
He paused, scanning my features still more intently. I was amazed
beyond measure at his strange words. The affair was getting more
and more inexplicable.
“But why,” I gasped; “why have I been selected to make a book of
Wanaki’s narrative?”
“Because you have sought to discover traces of some lost secrets
in our lore,” he replied. “I will speak your own words to you—they are
words which you put into a book. ‘We know not the ancient glory of
the Maori nor yet the wisdom which lies hidden behind his karakia.1
Some have said that the strange words of his incantations mean
nothing, but there is reason for believing that they are the surviving
fragments of a priestly language which was spoken many thousands
of years ago by a pre-Maori race dwelling on a great southern
continent, of which the present land of the Maori is but a small
remaining part.’ Those are your own words, O Pakeha, and it is
because you have had such long thoughts of the Maori and the race
that came before the Maori that I have been bidden to seek you out.”
“Yes,” I said, “those are my words; I remember them. But what do
you know of the race that was before the Maori’s coming from
Hawaiki?”
He was silent, seeming unwilling to speak of that race. At length
he said, “Far back in the ages my ancestors were of that race, but
when the Maori came they joined hands with them. Here is the gulf
that you cannot bridge in the history of our land; and, O Pakeha, it is
unbridged save by the platted rope of our priesthood, woven without
break, and stretching across the ages of Day and Night and Day.
Here before you is what seems the end of this rope; hidden in a
great light of long ago is the rock to which the other end is bound.
But I have not come to you to reveal the ancient wisdom which has
come down to me from the beginning of the world.” He laid his spear
in the hollow of his left arm and drew from within his robe a small
bundle, wrapped in a piece of neatly woven flaxcloth.
“This is the record of Wanaki,” he said, placing it upon the table
before me. “Make a book of it, and let not the moon die twice before
you have completed the task. That is my word, and behind it lies the
word of the Great Tohungas of the Earth.”
“But, my dear, good man,” said I, with rising temper, “Great
Tohungas of the Earth or no Great Tohungas of the Earth, I have
other things to do. I have other books to make; look here”—I turned
to the piles of manuscript on my table and placed my hand upon the
largest—“this book must be made before the moon has died once.”
“I care not,” he replied imperturbably. Then there was a flash of
quick anger in his eyes as he added: “You will obey my word, for the
cursing power of Ngaraki, my father, dwells in my eyes, and before
him no man could say ‘I will not!’ and live.”
At this barbarous attempt to browbeat a civilised human being with
the mention of a savage hereditary cursing power I was so amused
that I forgot both my anger and my fear and laughed loudly. But even
while my laugh was at its height my glance encountered that of my
visitor, and I became unaccountably silent. There was a fierce power
in his eyes which backed up his words, and my ill-timed amusement
gave place to a cold fear. What was this? His gaze held me as if in a
grip of iron, and though I struggled inwardly to free myself from its
strange hold, I was unable to do so. I tried to rise from my seat, but
could not. I made a frantic effort to cry out, but my voice refused to
act. With those terrible black eyes burning into mine I shivered and
fell back in my chair. Then I saw, or thought I saw, behind the form of
Aké Aké a line of grim and stately chiefs, standing in an unbroken
chain, which, ascending gradually into the far horizon, finally
disappeared in the distant mists of antiquity. As I looked sleep
pressed my eyelids down with a masterful hand, and I sank into
oblivion.
When I awoke half an hour later and found myself alone, my first
thought was that I had dreamed fantastically, and I had almost
confirmed myself in this conclusion when my glance fell upon the
package lying upon the table. I snatched it up and got at the
contents. I soon saw that it was indeed what my visitor had said—the
record of one Wanaki. With this record in my hand I could hardly
dismiss the matter as a dream. I rang the bell, and Gapper came in
smiling, just as he is wont to smile when some caller has been
generous. I questioned him as to whether he had let the visitor out.
“O yes, sir,” he replied; “some time ago.”
“Well, Gapper,” I asked carelessly, “what did you think of him, eh?”
Gapper grinned. It was the grin dedicated to gold, not mere silver.
“In the first place ’e was a gentleman, sir,” he said; “and in the
second place ’e kep’ up ’is disguise remarkable well. ’E looked like a
lord, sir. Might I make so bold as to ask who ’e reely was?”
“He is Aké Aké,” I said severely; “Aké Aké Rangitane, a great
Maori chief. And look here, Gapper, if you had as many pounds in
the bank as that chief has eaten men in his time you would be a rich
man.”
My man gaped at me in astonishment; then, when he was fully
assured that I was not joking, he went away and double-bolted all
the doors and windows.
But the record of Wanaki’s adventures—what of it? If the reader
will permit me to stand talking a little longer in another man’s
doorway, as an old writer of prefaces puts it, I have yet something to
say in reference to the ‘Pakeha Maori’s’ manuscript. At first I tossed
it aside as worthless, willing to take my chance of the wrath of the
Great Tohungas of the Earth, for it was written in such an
indecipherable hand that I could not bring myself to bear upon it. I
then set to other work that had to be completed by a certain date;
but, though all was plain sailing with this other work, I could make no
headway. My subject was void of difficulties, but I seemed to be
beating against a heavy wind. Several days passed in this fashion,
and it struck me that if the cursing power of Aké Aké and all his
ancestors was not at work upon me, I was afflicted with some
obscure nervous ailment.
At length, late one night, after many days of unrest, I took up the
manuscript again and managed to get through the first page, from
which I gathered that Wanaki’s adventures were of a remarkable
character. Then I felt drawn to follow his narrative, and would
certainly have done so but for the fact that his handwriting was a
thing that made me long for a cursing power of my own; I could not
arrive at its hidden meaning. When almost in despair, however, a
bright idea came to me. I would send the record to a man skilled in
the art of deciphering the indecipherable—I refer to my typist. I sent
it to him, and before one moon had died I received it back with the
mortifying assurance that as my handwriting had proved
considerably clearer than usual, he would be pleased to make a
proportionate abatement of the usual terms.
Now the second moon is nearly dead, and I have prepared the
work for the press. I am resolved it shall leave my hands this very
night, for, after a careful study of this remarkable history of Wanaki’s
adventures, I am fain to admit that, even when I smile most
incredulously at his experiences of the ancient magic of the Maori,
and the terrible cursing power of the hereditary priesthood, I shiver
most coldly at the thought that if the third moon sees my task
unfinished, I shall again be listening for a cab to stop at the street
door, for a bell to ring, and then—and then it will come to facing the
inscrutable eyes of Aké Aké. Reader, I will be frank with you. The set
scientific smile of scorn with which I, as a sane and sober medical
man, am wont to ornament my face at the mention of the cursing
formulæ of savage magic, and at other things contained in the record
of Wanaki, is now a matter of long habit, and will continue until death
comes with a powerful screw-wrench to remove it; but behind that
bold front of second nature there lies a disquieting memory of a
moment when, laughing, I encountered the gaze of Aké Aké, and
was bound by some mysterious spell to do his bidding.
The Maori chief has not visited me again, but I have just received
a letter from him with another, from a third person, enclosed. Both of
these I have inserted at the close of Wanaki’s narrative, which I now
lay before the reader in the following pages.

The Editor.
 WANAKI’S FOREWORD.
As I sit down to write this history of strange adventures the words
of my aged friend, the chief and tohunga Te Makawawa, come up in
my mind:
“O Son, the word of our ancient law is death to any who reveals
the secrets that are hidden in the Brow of Ruatapu. The secret of
Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn; the Mystery of the Vile Tohungas
of the Pit, the traditions of far time preserved in the heart of the Great
Rock—all, everything, is a death-blow returning on the head of him
who reveals it. Yet, O Son of the Great Ocean of Kiwa, I, who was
once the guardian priest of the Temple of Hia and the hereditary
curser of the Vile Ones of the Abyss of Huo, now show these things
to you, for I am weary of climbing the snows of Ruahine and long for
rest and Tane’s Living Waters. The Great Tohungas of the Earth
have taught me in my sleep with words like the voice of the wind in
the forest trees: ‘O Tohunga of the Great Rock, the mystery of
Hinauri is not for the Maori unless thou tell it first to the Sons of the
Sea, but know, if thou tell it, thou must die.’ Therefore, Son, I show it
to you, for, what though I fear the eye of the fierce Ngaraki, I fear not
death. Friend! perchance, when I have descended by the sacred
Pohutukawa root, you, too, will tire of life and tell this thing to your
brethren, ‘but know, if thou tell it, thou must die.’ ”
Well may I pause here, for after what I have seen in the Brow of
Ruatapu, in the Temple of Hia, and in the Abyss of Huo, disbelief in
the ancient laws of the priesthood of the Great Rock is not for me.
But for me is the truth of the aged tohunga’s words, and for me also
is the rest that he longed for and the living waters of Tane; for so
clearly do I read the truth of a civilised world in the truth of Maori
lore, that I believe when I am bathed in those Waters of Life and
pass through the darkness into the Light, I shall look into her eyes
again—the dark eyes of Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, the
Bright One who came out of ancient night to give a sign, and
withdrew again into the skies, leaving my world all desolate. The
mystery of her coming was that sign, and I will reveal it, partly
because the sorrow of her going is such that the penalty of death is
welcome to me, and partly because a voice—I know not if it is the
voice of the Great Tohungas of the Earth—teaches me, too, in
dreams, that my brethren, the Sons of the Sea, of whom the dark-
skinned children of Ira might with justice ask much, should hear and
consider this Sign of Power. Not to be buried at last in oblivion has it
been nursed and guarded by an unbroken priesthood of hereditary
succession extending back, through Maori and pre-Maori races,
through the dark night of Time, even to the glorious sunset of a
former Day. Not for naught has it come down from a remote age,
whence, O Reader, you have heard only the voices of seers telling,
in whispered tones, of

“Mighty pre-Adamites who walked the earth

Of which ours is the wreck.”