The Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi of Davida Malo Volume 2 by Davida Malo, Charles Langlas, et al.

Hawaiian Text and English Translation. Davida Malo’s Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi is the single most important description of pre-Christian Hawaiian culture. Malo, born in 1795, twenty-five years before the coming of Christianity to Hawaiʻi, wrote about everything from traditional cosmology and accounts of ancestral chiefs to religion and government to traditional amusements. The heart of this two-volume work is a new, critically edited text of Malo’s original Hawaiian, including the manuscript known as the “Carter copy,” handwritten by him and two helpers in the decade before his death in 1853. Volume 1, edited by Jeffrey Lyon, provides images of the original manuscript pages, side by side with the new edited text. Volume 2, edited and translated by Charles Langlas and Jeffrey Lyon, presents the edited Hawaiian text side by side with a new annotated English translation. Malo’s text has been edited at two levels. First, the Hawaiian has been edited through a careful comparison of all the extant ma