Red Indian Tales [antikvár]

FOREWORD IJ EW MEN HAVE THE GIFT OF TRANSCENDING NATIONAL ORIGIN and cultural heritage to enter intimately and understandingly into the life of a people alien to them by birth. Jaime de Angulo was such a man. His forty years of living among the Pit River Indians of California gave him the opportunity of identifying himself with his neighbours so completely and sympathetically that it might truly be said of him that no feeling was theirs which was not also his. His early years in his native Spain and his educational experiences at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, while not so important to his final literary product, gave him the further advantages of perspective and objectivity without which this book could not be so important a contribution to our literature. Jaime de Angulo had both the judgment and the intuition to realise that translation of atmosphere and feeling and fancy cannot be left to scholars. Only over the bridge of his own creative imagination could he lead his readers across the barriers of a strange language and a distinctively different culture, into wise and true appreciation. He was a professed student of anthropology, and in these pages some of his findings are recorded, but this book was written by a poet. Other writers, Geoffrey Chaucer among them, have used the description of a fictional journey as a basic structure on which to stretch the colourful peltry of tale and poem which