ers Pele:
I drilled till flame shot forth on Lanai,
A pit candescent by Pele.

The morning looks forth aslant;
45 Heaven's curtains roll up and roll down;
There's a ring of o-o 'neath the sod.
Who, asks Wakea, the god,
Who is this devil a-digging?
'Tis I, 'tis Pele, I who
50 Dug on Maui the pit to the fire:
Ah, the crater of Maui,
Red-glowing with Pele's own fire!

Heaven's painted one side by the dawn,
Her curtains half open, half drawn;
55 A rumbling is heard far below.
Wakea insists he will know
The name of the god that tremors the land.
'Tis I, grumbles Pele,
I have scooped out the pit Hu'e-hu'e,
60 A pit that reaches to fire,
A fire fresh kindled by Pele.

Now day climbs up to the East;
Morn folds the curtains of night;
The spade of sapper resounds 'neath the plain:
65 The goddess is at it again!
[Page 88]
This mele comes to us stamped with the hall-mark of
antiquity. It is a poem of mythology, but with what story it
connects itself, the author knows not.

The translation here given makes no profession of absolute,
verbal literalness. One can not transfer a metaphor bodily,
head and horns, from one speech to another. The European had
to invent a new name for the boomerang or accept the name by
which the Australian called it. The Frenchman, struggling
with the English language, told a lady he was _gangrened_, he
meant he was _mortified_. The cry for literalism is the cry
for an impossibility; to put the chicken back into its shell,
to return to the bows and arrows of the stone age.

To make the application to the mele in question: the word
_hu-olo-olo_, for example, which is translated in several
different ways in the poem, is of such generic and
comprehensive meaning that one word fails to express its
meaning. It is, by the way, not a word to be found in any
dictionary. The author had to grope his way to its meaning by
following the tra