Poetic Hawaiian Bible to be recorded

A person reading the Bible in English may not know that much of the Hebrew Old Testament is poetry. In English, the passages are in prose.

But Hawaiian-language readers know about the poetry, because the Hawaiian Bible retains poetic translations.

Because of the literary and linguistic value of the Hawaiian Bible, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs recently granted $191,849 to the Partners in Development Foundation to make a voice recording of the entire Bible.

The project is part of efforts by various agencies to preserve a half million pages of Hawaiian documents, said Kalena Silva, a professor of Hawaiian at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

First among them was the Bible, the first major document in Hawaiian, said Jack Keppeler, head of the Baibala Hemolele (Holy Bible) project of Partners in Development.

"It's the cornerstone of the language," he said.

The missionaries who translated the Bible were educated in Biblical Hebrew and Greek, Keppeler said. They went straight from Biblical languages into Hawaiian, working with Hawaiians skilled in the oral traditions, he said.

But the Hawaiian language of nearly 200 years ago was often different from the Hawaiian spoken today. The Bible first published in 1837-39 preserves words and sentence structures no longer in use, he said.

Baibala Hemolele project coordinator Helen Kaowili, skilled in Hebrew, Greek and Hawaiian, gave an example of Biblical poetry.

The poem in Hebrew is arranged so that every line is shorter than the preceding one, until it ends in a single word, which gives the appearance of a V on a printed page. The Hawaiian Bible retains the poetry, but not the printed V format.*

Modern scholars had hesitated to use public money for a religious text, Keppeler said. But beginning in 1990, Congress mandated preserving native American languages and gave grants to do it.

University of Hawaii constitutional scholar Jon Van Dyke said public funding does not violate separation of church and state. "It's a valid and useful way to save and resurrect the Hawaiian language," he said.

The first phase of the project used a $450,000 federal grant to put missionary spellings into modern form, primarily using a computer program at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, Keppeler said. That work is nearly done.

The new OHA grant will be combined with another federal grant of $432,000, plus in-kind donations of $189,000 to record the Bible.

Silva at UH-Hilo said even modernized texts can seem dusty and fragile, like their originals. Hearing the words makes a difference.

"If you hear folks, it really makes it come alive. It shows that Hawaiian is a viable language," he said.

The Bible was the beginning of an explosion of reading and writing by 19th-century Hawaiians. More than 100 newspapers were published in Hawaiian up to 1948, Keppeler said. Hawaiians served in both the Union and Confederate navies, writing accounts of the Civil War in their own language, he said.

The tradition continues, Silva said. The Hawaiian Electronic Library, www.ulukau.org, which includes the Bible, has received 5 million hits from all over the world, he said. Some come from Afghanistan and Iraq.