Lee Haring

Attitude, tone, humor, irony, and allusion--most of what makes oral
narrative entertaining--usually get lost in transcription and translation.
Once a story has been extracted from a context where audiences under-
stand its allusions, the reader's imagination or the analyst's footnotes
must supply what is missing. Can attitude and tone be retrieved from
print? From sacred narrative, with its connection to unspoken beliefs, the
loss is all the keener. When sacred narrative is parodied, the strata of
unattainable meaning multiply again. How shall the English reader dis-
cern the attitude of a translated myth text like the following?

God makes a statue of a woman. One man finds it but leaves it in the
care of another, who turns it over. They quarrel about possession of
the woman and go to God with their argument:

"I found her," said the first man. But God didn't give her to him.

"Even if he found her," said the other man, "it is I who turned her
over."

"Whoever it was who turned her over," said God, "is her master."

That is the origin of marriage because he had turned her over.

The whole story hinges on a pun on "woman" (vali) and "turn over"
(valiki). ( Edmonson 1971 :161, commenting on text from Faublée 1947 :354-
56)

In this oft-told Malagasy myth about male dominance, what is the point
of the pun? The popularity of the story guarantees its sacred status; does
the pun shift the tale away from sacred narrative towards parody? Perhaps
humor and parody, here as in many cultures, are finding raw material for
variation in the serious words, thought, or structure of myth. What tools

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