Translating the Kumulipo in Confinement

The Kumulipo is a genealogical chant of over two thousand lines that carries the origin of the world and the descent of a chiefly line. It opens in darkness and works upward through paired sea and land forms, coral and its companion plant, and only later reaches human generations, so that the chant is at once a cosmogony and a title deed: to recite it is to state who a chief is and by what line.

Liliuokalani worked on an English translation during her imprisonment and afterwards, and published it in Boston in 1897. Her stated reason was preservation. Missionary teaching had treated the chants as heathen and Hawaiian literacy had been turned almost entirely toward scripture and newspapers, and a chant of that length survives only while people can still recite and explain it.

The choice is not a small one for a Christian queen. The Kumulipo is not a folk tale but the framework of a religious and political order the mission had worked to displace, and putting it into English placed it where scholars and courts could read it. Martha Warren Beckwith produced a second scholarly translation in 1951 and worked from Liliuokalani's text as well as from the printed Hawaiian, and later Hawaiian language revival has returned to the chant repeatedly. That a deposed monarch spent her confinement on it says as much about what she thought was at stake as any of her political writing does.