The Mana of Translation

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada is a writer, poet, and photographer. An assistant professor at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa, he uses Hawaiian traditional knowledge and stories to navigate and imagine Hawaiian futures.

In The Mana of Translation: Translational Flow from the Baibala to the Mauna, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada makes visible the often unseen workings of translation in Hawaiʻi from the advent of Hawaiian alphabetic literacy to contemporary struggles over language and land. Translation has had a massive impact on Hawaiian history, both as it unfolded and how it came to be understood, yet it remains understudied in Hawaiian and Indigenous scholarship. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Kuwada examines illuminative instances of translation across the last two centuries through the analytic of mana unuhi, the mana (power/authority/branch/version) attained or given through translation. Translation has long been seen as a tool of colonialism, but examining history through mana unuhi demonstrates how Hawaiians used translation as a powerful tool to assert their own literary, cultural, and political sovereignty, something Hawaiians think of in terms of ea (life/breath/sovereignty/rising). Translation also gave mana to particular stories about Hawaiians--some empowering, others harmful--creating a clash of narratives that continue to this day. Drawing on sources in Hawaiian and English that span newspapers, letters and journals, religious and legal documents, missionary records, court transcripts, traditional stories, and more, this book makes legible the utility and importance of paying attention to mana unuhi in Hawaiʻi and beyond.