 My talk today concerns recent publications of translations of e-traditional literature, especially so-called epic poems and related long ritual texts. I will first give a brief overview of what I see as the arc of development of e-literature studies since the 1950s, then several very recent publications that attempt to introduce traditional e-literature to the world, utilizing English as a language of interaction. I will then focus on the translation of Nowatai or Book of Origins, a key narrative that is connected to many facets of spiritual and cultural life of the Norse subgroup of e. I will also mention similar developments in texts translated from other local literatures in Southwest China and briefly introduce contemporary e-poetry which since its blossoming in the 1980s has often incorporated elements of traditional myth, ritual, epic, and folklore. This is just a map of basically sort of the area that we're dealing with here. I'll give a little bit of background on things. We have a couple of experts on e-traditional script here. We'll be presenting so I won't say too much about it. But traditional e-writing was in various local scripts. We have examples of this going way back, carvings, casting, scrolls, et cetera, some of these supposedly over a thousand years old in terms of the castings. In metal, differing script traditions in Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou, writing was the provenance of bimou ritualists, this sort of priest, though in earlier times might have been known by other people. Some of these early stone carvings and things like that would seem to indicate that somebody else knew these scripts. The origins of the script, as far as I know, were unknown. Some scholars say they may date to the Tang dynasty, some people say earlier, some people say later. I'm not really, again I'll let our linguists discuss that. Early existing written texts on paper anyway would probably date I guess to the late Ming or early Qing. The script is still used, the written script by bimou priests today, especially throughout southern Sichuan province. By the 1970s there was a standardized northern e-script. It has limited use today in the Lianxian e-autonomous prefecture in southern Sichuan province. It's still used in I guess some newspapers. I've seen it in textbooks, in middle schools, in high schools, even things like chemistry books, mathematical books, things like that. And the use by this that I'm most interested in is by contemporary poets. We'll talk about a little bit later in the talk. Here's an image of bimou priests from a large international gathering that some of us attended back, I guess it was my recollection, it was in 2005 in Meku. And this was part of a large event that had I think over 60 bimou from the area participating in some of these re-enactments of rituals. You can see that one of the priests is holding one of the written scrolls there. I've started to use this sort of term transmutation of traditional e-literature since the 1950s. Pre-1949, we've got various collections of e-texts going on. I think that this may have started back in the early, rather late 19th century with one of the French missionaries in the Sani areas. And then Professor Ma Shrelian was one of the Chinese scholars, ethno-linguists who collected many texts and many other texts were collected and now exist in various places around the world. In the 1950s, the government led various collection teams consisting of students and teachers, mostly from universities in Yunnan. And they had several collection projects in parts of especially northern Yunnan and the northeast, collecting texts like Ashrama, Megha, Cham, Saibomua, which is the seventh sister in the serpent, or snake and serpent and human Mary. And these were collected again by these teams who went out, they didn't have tape recorders or what have you. It was a very, very tedious process of working through sometimes several people to get the things translated. Some of these texts were from oral performances such as a Megha, other of them like Chamu were based on written texts. There were a lot of issues with reliability and collection methods, but nevertheless these texts have been reprinted over and over again since the late 1970s after the Cultural Revolution and into the early 1980s. Some of these have even been retranslated as I'll talk about later and published just in the last year or so. So regardless of what we think about the reliability of these texts, they're having a huge impact on representation of the E in the public consciousness. From the mid 1980s to early 2000s, more texts appear in Chinese translation. That is the medium that these things are going into or in multi-linear versions, sometimes with e-graphs, sometimes with IPA format, sometimes in northern e-pening, sometimes with word-for-word Chinese vernacular texts. Xin'an Ichir from Bijie area in Guizhou. They've done a lot of these multi-linear texts have been published. Ashrama has been published, that epic poem, the Sani people has been published numerous times in various formats. Also a text called Pupaji, which is about the origin of the local Sani people from Shirling. And then texts such as the Runaway Bride story, Gamo Anyo from Liangshan area in Sichuan. Mamutoyi, Novatoyi, these are a book of teaching, book of origins and so forth from Sichuan province. All of these have appeared in various sorts of published versions. Then from the early 2000s, around what 2006, 2007 or so, you get this influence of the intangible cultural heritage initiatives on China, which have really been this massive force that is transforming folk traditions in China today, at least the public representation of them. And there's also been a concurrent stimulus by the government to bring back the appreciation of traditional sorts of folk life through the filter of the modern sort of sense of what tradition is in China. And e-texts have been part of this. In 1980s to 2020, there's also been a utilization of elements of traditional literature and folklore in modern e-poetry. Most of this is written in Chinese, but there is a group of poets, which I'll talk about later, who use Northern Eda composed in. So they use a modern version of the traditional script. I'll be talking a little bit about some translations of epics. I recently did a paper that was published in China Pearl papers in the U.S. about these collections. So I won't go into it too much today, but there's been a lot of these texts collected. Some of them were collected from various ethnic groups in the 1950s and they're still being collected today. And again, they appear in sometimes these multilinear texts with some version of the original language, IPA. So for some are based on oral performances. Some are on written texts and so forth. So you can break these down into the numerous sorts of categories that they appear in. But this notion of epic, which in the past, you know, there was this notion that China didn't have epics, but later on this term has become quite fashionable over the last 20 or so years or 30 years in representing this work of the literary work of various ethnic minority groups in China. Here's a few examples from E. Miao and Hood's end of these texts. Again, some of these appear in a multilinear format. Some of them are simply translated into Chinese, but some of them appear in, completely in, say, E-language or what have you. So you have to have this whole variety of things. But I think what's important is that they are being published and they are being distributed in some fashion. So examples of recent publications regarding traditional E-literature in China. So there are, in some case, reproductions and introductions of these traditional E-scripts where they take the traditional scrolls or what have you and make photo images of them and then basically put them into a modern book form, sometimes with an introduction in Chinese or maybe even E, sometimes without that. And then again, these various multilinear editions. And these are published by official publishing houses, including some of these ethnic publishing houses in Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan. Some of these projects seem to now be published, self-publishing happens. Sometimes even these texts that have been published by the official texts seem to be being funded by people that have a lot of money or families who want these things published. And so they help out with the publishing of these things. And one example of one of these recent publications is from the Xiaoliangshan area on the Sichuan-Yunnan border, a Northwest Yunnan. And it's called the E-Bimua Scriptures from Xiaoliangshan. And it's a 10-volume set edited by Lu Baosheng and Lu Zhifao, which are kind of local intellectuals there in Xiaoliangshan. And again, it's these photocopies of these original E-Bimua manuscripts with translated titles and short prefaces in Chinese, but the texts themselves are not translated. They're just there for anyone who is able to read them. Also, there's scholars at the Yunseh University in Korea have translated Maygooncham from these texts from northern Yunnan, Chuxuang area. Just republished in the last year or so. So here's this example here of these Xiaoliangshan texts. You can see over here, you've got this image of Zhuge'alu, the hero who shoots down the extra suns and moons that are overheating the earth in the epics. So I'll mention a few examples of recent English translations of these epics now. This actually is a singer from the Obyan region in a southern Sichuan who's singing the Gamo Anio story about the runaway bride and it's sort of a bridal lament and usually two singers sing this as sort of an example of an oral sort of narrative poem. And again, this has been published in Chinese translation. I'm thinking about translating this at some point in the English. As we get into this English translation of these texts, there's something that's I find quite fascinating and there's this sort of a move on the part of groups of Chinese translators who are translating Chinese classics and minority epics into English in Chinese. They're not native speakers, but they've taken upon themselves to translate these items of ethnic minority literature into English for what audience? Evidently just an international audience. So there's an increase in a number of epics translated by Chinese translation teams. Again, due to this intangible cultural heritage agendas and money supplied by them. I'm aware of quite a few Chinese translation teams, sometimes multi-ethnic, sometimes they're Han people translating this literature, sometimes they're multi-ethnic, sometimes they're foreign proof readers and translated dozens of these ethnic minority epics from Chinese. These translations actually, this style of translation dates at least back to the 1950s with Gladys Young translating the Ashrama story of the honey. Yunnan People's Publishing House is preparing a series of translations of seven tune epics from various ethnic groups in Yunnan, all by teams of Chinese translators and they're being revised that is proof read by foreign native speakers of English. Sometimes it seems to work quite well. Other times, wonder about the quality of the translations or the English, but it's serving a purpose of communicating this material. For instance, the Press, Yunnan People's Publishing House released two versions of the Yunnan e-epic and again it's an oral epic, it's not in written form. The written form is in Chinese now. It's called Meig'e and it's based on a composite version published in Chinese in 1959 and republished in the 70s, 90s and 2000s in Chinese and it's based on oral performances of Chu Xiong'i Autonomous Prefecture in Northern Yunnan, the Lipua Subgroup of Yi. This is a picture of Gao Xia who is sort of the head of the translation team. I heard about this in the summer of 2018. They asked me to write a preface. I said, please let me see your translation and when I got the translation and the English translation I felt it was pretty good but I spent a little bit of time helping to proof read it and so forth. So this text had just come out in the last few months and that's the cover of the book there and part of this first thing. It's all about origin text, creation of the world, you know, what have you. So, you know, there was no mold to create the sky. There was no mold to make the earth. The sky was like an umbrella, the earth was like a bridge. So it's this sort of typical sort of thing that you see in these origin or creation epics from Southwest China in terms of the imagery, the creation of the sky and it has many, many motifs that it shares with other epics. But again, this is a sort of put together epic that was collected in the 1950s from several singers in different versions of things and there you've got the whole contents with the creation of the world and humankind, the origin of humans, building houses, hunting, farming, marriage, love songs. So all of these things were songs that were gathered from various singers. It's interesting, I was able to interview some of the collectors of this text back in the 1980s and they talked about things that got into the volume and things which were not included into the volume. There's this whole thing in there about funerals and so forth that were actually, they told me, were actually chanced by Beemaw but they weren't allowed to really mention that in the text and they wrote other articles about that that were published in the Naboo Press explaining what these things were. So it was quite interesting, they were quite interesting in getting that material out there but they had to go through the correct channels to get it published. Then there's also antiphonal love songs that are included in this text. So again, a common sort of format for oral performance in Southwest China. In terms of another text, probably from another end of the perspective, this is a text that was just published in 2018 or parts of a text. The whole thing is not actually in the book, it's mostly commentary and literary critical sort of approach to traditional e-literature from Northern Yunnan. It's called Songs for Dead Parents, Corpse Text and World in Southwest China by Eric Mowgler who's a professor of anthropology at University of Michigan and he wrote another earlier work called The Age of Wild Ghost. Again, this is literary criticism, Western Literary Criticism and Anthropology which is sort of superimposed upon these traditions in Southwest China and sort of seeking to interpret them in various ways. So the text illuminates traditional funeral practices of a E-sub group, mostly Lola Poe in Northern Yunnan, especially the construction of these effigies of the seas called Buu and so it provides an enlightening intersection between local traditional beliefs, ethnography of performance, Western interpretive theory, focuses on the construction of effigies in the funeral process and the relations of the dead to the living in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. So it has a special significance for examining the relations between text, belief and practices. So if you're interested in this sort of approach to things, this would be a good text to use maybe in the classroom. Now the project that I've been working on for the last number of years with Professor Luo Chengxuan who's Han Chinese version of his Yi name Aku Wuwu is Aku Wuwu and Ji Vo Zouchu who is a local tradition bear from a Shida area of Liangshan and this is something that we just published with the University of Washington Press this last summer, the preface was written by Stephen Harrell and so this is a translation of the Nuotou Yi which is what I consider to be sort of the key ritual text of Yi in the Liangshan area. Liangshan e Autonomous Prefecture in Southern Sichuan is where this text was collected. There's been versions of this published in Chinese before. This is the first I think major translation of this text. The text survives in many, many forms. There's oral performances which are done off of this text that circulate and of course those vary endlessly and then there's many, many written versions of this text but the text that we had was obtained by Ji Vo Zouchu from an older ritualist and then he over the years translated this or transmuted it into Northern Yi following the text, used the new format for the sound of the characters and so forth. The Nuotou again, there are about two million people upland farmers and so forth from Southern Sichuan and the standard Northern Yi script is based upon the spoken tradition in an area of Shidou. Here's a picture of Ji Vo Zouchu reciting passages from the Novo to Yi. He does not know the whole text. He usually to perform, he knows parts of it, he can perform. He is actually not a bimo. He's a Ndugu, he's a sort of a traditional dispute arbitrator, wise man in the community but again he took an interest in this text, learned the Yi writing when he was younger and on very few occasions will recite parts of it and usually he'll have a written text that he'll consult before he does that so this does not seem to be a real case of sort of oral composition but then again I have not seen him in so many contexts so young, there's singers who do these sort of riffs off Novo to Yi in various oral contacts at marriages and funerals and so forth so it's a complex and living tradition and this is his sort of way of dealing with it. So again this Novo to Yi, it's this major traditional narrative of the Nozu. It's been described as an epic or a folk encyclopedia. There's a lot of things that I find interesting about it in terms of the cosmography in it, the way the details of the environment and the local cultures that are in it, how things are rooted in the text, the sort of ecogenological sort of rooting in the origins of sky, earth, plants, animals and humans and a lot of this fits into these sort of globalized discussions we're having about indigenous studies today, space and place and cosmography, the pluriverse with a very inclusive view of life forms and so forth. And there's also a lot of things about migration and dwelling, migrating through the landscapes and dwelling within the landscape, finding an ideal place to settle it. That's the whole last part of the text deals with that, through the experience of various plans. And these are just a few lines from the beginning in the most ancient past and the vast expanse of the heavens with the home, the skyscraper, and so forth. And then it goes, and these tend to end with, and thus is the genealogy of the sky above. So you have all of these passages that tell where things come from. And there's passages that have to do with the Jugaalu, who was a mythic hero of the E people and versions of him appear in various local E literatures. There's the genealogy of his mother, which is actually the only genealogy of a woman within this text before she gives birth to him after being splattered by blood from dragon eagles flying above and so forth. And these are just a few lines from her genealogy. You can see it goes through these various clans and so forth, but she did not marry. Okay, so instead Jugaalu comes about from this marriage between her and the dragon or this relationship between her and the dragon eagles. And she was out weaving in front of her house when she saw the dragon eagles fly over. And so forth. One section of this is called the 12 Branches of Snow and talks about the six groups that had blood and the six group with no blood. And this happens after life on earth is wiped out by the global warming and then it's being replanted on earth from snow falling down from the sky. And so it's quite interesting in terms of sort of an ecogeniological, ecocritical view of seeing how things were sort of divided up in this fashion with between plants that have no blood and animals that have blood, including humans. And we had this whole, you know, a small group of people who were working on this, this sort of constellation of collaborators with Aku and Jibo Zochu and his nephew Jibo Yizu. And this is Aku Wu here, who's Dean of the E-Studies at Southwest Music University. I just heard this last week that this whole Institute of E-Studies at Southwest University of Nationalities and the Institute for Tibetan Studies are now done, they're closed, they don't exist anymore and it's all being put into one big department of literature right now. This seems to be happening all over. And here's Aku performing his Calling Back the Soul of Juga Aalu, which is one of his poems that he wrote in Northern E-language in 1980s. And he's very well known for this poem. And that, again, Jibo Zochu. And you can see he's carrying his versions of the scriptures in his hand there. And here's a book from the Xerox copy of what we used to translate. This was, again, translated out of following a traditional scroll that he put into Northern E format. So it's basically the same, just the pronunciation change. And when we were doing the, before we started the translation, Aku thought it was important that we had spiritual sanction for this. So he, a bimoa named A-yu bimoa came and sat with us as we started the translation and opened his scrolls and so forth before we began. That's Jibo Yisu and that's us working on the translation together. Checking the E in Chinese versions. The Chinese version and E version will be published soon. We've got an online version of the Nosu Pinyin version that's online with the book that we just published. So these are just some pictures. Some of the themes in modern E poetry I'll wrap up up here in a minute. A lot of themes on ethnic identity and culture, cultural change, ecological change. Indigenous literature, eco literature, place literature, ethnographic, cosmographic. Some of these themes fall into what Chadwick Allen talks about in his book Trans-Indigenous about Native American and Maori writing. I had a volume of poetry come out in 2017 where I collected the works of 49 different poets from Northeast India, Myanmar, Mongolia, Southwest China, and we published them in the borderlands of Asia and there's several Nosu poets within this book. It's all English versions of it, but it's another way that E literature is taking its place in the world through translation. And also the work of G.D. Maja who basically created modern E poetry in the 1980s but he writes in Chinese. Aka Wu writes in both E and Chinese so it's kind of a difference between them. But G.D. Maja has got some very powerful positions in China. Head of the Chinese Writers Association was a big governor or something out in Qinghai province for a while and had these international poetry contests and things like that and his work has been translated into several languages including English by Dennis Mayer. And here's a picture of Aka Wu's first, this is a, we think it's the first Nosu language poetry book in English that was published in 2006 where we translated several of his poems and so forth. And then he's published a few E poems with E language in places like Basalt and some other literary journals. And also Bamo Chupamo is another E poet, writes, writes in Chinese, one of the well known scholar. Maybe some of you I think know her quite well. So at my conclusion, interest in E ethnic group and E literature has grown in China and the world since the 1980s. Critical mass of interest in materials was reached by the early 2000s and resulted in several international E conferences. Of course that included things besides literature. Unique teams of international researchers formed of the late 1990s, that's Stephen Harrell, Bamo Ayi, Bamo Chupamo, as an example of anthropological and folkloristic research in the literary fields, the attention is be given to E poetry, especially the Norsu poets associated with the Lianchen region of Sichuan. Collaboration between E poets such as Genie Maja and Dennis Mayer and myself and Aka Wubu. Collaboration and translating E traditional epic and ritual literature has increased slowly due to linguistic and cultural barriers. An example of work on another group of ethnic group from Southwest China is that of David Holm and Meng Yuanyao who translated a couple of two or three, at least a Zhuang epics from Guangxi that is quite an interesting model that they follow. I think that there's an urgent task is the continued training of scholars in China and abroad to develop language competency and to further collaboration for research and translation and concert with Bimo and others who can read the traditional texts. I think this is really a key sort of thing which should be overcome somehow or another. While thousands of texts have been gathered, care must be taken that in coming years they do not go silent from lack of persons who can read and voice them even before they are adequately studied. So that's my little talk on some aspects of current developments in E literature today. So thank you very much.