AMERICAN INDIANS LITERATURE BOOK (Diné bahane' The Navajo Creation Story)

Diné bahane'
The Navajo
Creation Story
Paul G. Zolbrod

AMERICAN INDIANS • LITERATURE
"A brilliant rendering of a folk epic into a fascinating and highly literate work of art—a tapestry of exceptional events recounted in vivid, strong, and highly atmospheric lan-guage, a language, to use a phrase of the late John Gardner, that is 'at once ancient and ultramodern.'"
—New York Times
This is the most complete version of the Navio eation story
to appear in English since the publication of Washington Matthews's Navaho Legends in 1897. Paul G. Zolbrod's new translation attempts to render the power and delicacy of the oral storytelling performance on the page. His use of poetic English idiom appropriate to the Navajo oral tradition gives us a translation that retains the social and religious significance of the original stories.
He has worked with archival materials including transcriptions of early twentieth-century Navajo performances, and he has talked with Navajo elders who helped him to