The Nuosu Book of Origins

"This translation is a treasure: a window into one of China's richest indigenous traditions. After many centuries of momentous change and political upheaval in the vast empire that surrounds it, Nuosu culture remains alive and remarkably well in its rugged heartland of Liángshān. It also remains remarkably complex, maintaining a working script and written literature of its own side by side with a deep-rooted oral tradition. We are all now indebted to the Nuosu elder Jjivot Zopqu, the Nuosu poet Aku Wuwu, and the American scholar Mark Bender for sharing what they know of this beleaguered and beautiful world."—Robert Bringhurst, author of A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World

""Hnewo" in the Nuosu language means "passed down through mouth and ears." This long narrative poem from the Nuosu Yi people in the Cool Mountains of Southwestern Sichuan is an intimate part of their ritual life; combined with the kenre practice of verbal dueling it is a feature of the rites of passage of these mountain people—weddings, funerals, and the ceremony to send souls of the dead back to the ancestors. Recited in these ritual contexts, the epic embodies Yi people's cognitive and emotional experience of the cycle of human life and of people's place in the larger natural world and cosmos. Jjivot Zopqu has provided a precious resource for the world of folklore studies, while Mark Bender and Aku Wuwu have done a great service by translating this epic and introducing it to the English-reading public."—Bamo Qubumo, Senior Research Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and co-author of Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China