LIHU‘E — More than 50 years later, celebrated Hawaiian-language translator Frances Nelson Hali’aalohanokekupuna Frazier still isn’t quite sure what initially drew her so strongly to the Hawaiian language. Though her mother was part-Hawaiian, the family spoke only English at home.
LIHU‘E — More than 50 years later, celebrated Hawaiian-language translator Frances Nelson Hali’aalohanokekupuna Frazier still isn’t quite sure what initially drew her so strongly to the Hawaiian language.
Though her mother was part-Hawaiian, the family spoke only English at home.
“My mother belonged to that generation that was punished for speaking even one Hawaiian word in school,” she said. And even though her ship-captain father spoke Hawaiian to his crews at work, she had never heard him speak the language.
Recalling those days from her home office on the top floor of one of Sun Village’s towers here, her endearing small dog Mea Li‘i Li‘i sitting on her lap and looking lovingly up at her, Frazier recalled how she became acquainted with the language that would connect her and countless others to their Hawaiian ancestry and history.
Frazier, 89, believes it must have been providence that led her to volunteer as a typist for renowned Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui at Bishop Museum in the 1930s, exposing her for the first time to a language that at the time was nearing extinction.
“I was guided,” she said. “For no reason at all I volunteered to go and type up Kawena Pukui’s translations.”
The connection she made with the words helped bring back to life and light part of a civilization that had been pushed to the collective attic of consciousness when Hawai‘i became a territory of the United States. “They told everybody, ‘You’re an American, forget you’re Hawaiian. We don’t want to hear Hawaiian spoken,'” she said.
Reading Pukui’s translations “showed me that the Hawaiian language is not the language of an ignorant savage people,” she said. “It is a very beautiful language, just full of all sorts of wonderful things.”
At the time Pukui, who didn’t know how to type, had been translating oli (chants), and that’s what Frazier typed up for her. “I was struck by the beauty of the words and her translations,” Frazier said. “So that’s what got me hooked.”
Through her work in later years translating dramatic and gripping stories of famous Hawaiians, others were captivated as well, and educated about Hawaiian history.
Her translation of the powerful and heart-wrenching story in the book “The True Story of Kaluaiko‘olau, as Told by his Wife Pi‘ilani,” had the broadest impact of all her work, said Puakea Nogelmeier, a longtime assistant professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Nogelmeier, himself a noted translator of Hawaiian stories and legends, was one of Frazier’s teachers.
“Ko‘olau,” as he is called in the book, was the Hawaiian who contracted leprosy in the early 1890s, but because of a new government policy forbidding kokuas (helpers) from accompanying their loved ones in exile at the leper colony on Moloka‘i, he refused to go.
Instead, Ko‘olau and his wife Pi‘ilani, who had vowed never to be apart from each other, banished themselves and their young son to remote Kalalau Valley, where other Hawaiians afflicted with leprosy had taken refuge with their families. Eventually the sheriff and his men tracked down Ko‘olau, and a battle with tragic consequences ensued.
“She introduced to an English-speaking audience a story that had not been told in English,” Nogelmeier said. “The historical perspective that had been put out about Ko‘olau had really been slanted by the English press. The Hawaiian version is a really sympathetic point of view.”
It wasn’t an easy job translating from the original text which had been dictated by Pi‘ilani to John Sheldon, aka Kahikina Kelekona, and published in Hawaiian in 1906. “He (Sheldon) writes in almost Victorian prose of Hawaiian,” said Nogelmeier. “I translated his other book. It’s really, really challenging.”
So challenging that there were times when Frazier wondered if she was translating correctly, encountering many words that people hadn’t used for ages. More than once she relied upon the extensive Hawaiian dictionary compiled by her early mentor Kawena Pukui.
“I had been sitting there struggling with these words and I thought, ‘Am I understanding this? Am I getting it?'” Frazier recounted. “All of a sudden I was weeping. It was the part where the little boy died, and I started to cry.
“And I said, ‘I’m getting it. I’m understanding it.’ Until that moment, I hadn’t really believed that I was understanding the language.”
Frazier also translated an epic, 500-page book about King Kamehameha I, titled “Kamehameha and His Warrior Kekuhaupio,” which was awarded “Best Hawai‘i Book of the Year” in 2001 by the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association.
Originally published in the 1920s by Stephen Desha as a series of weekly columns over three years in his Hawaiian-language newspaper, Desha had culled the information from oral interviews and other sources.
The translation project took years. When Frazier presented the huge finished product to the Hawaiian Historical Society for publication, she was told it was much too large for them. Eventually the book was published by Kamehameha Schools, which is as Frazier believes it should be.
In the early years before her acclaimed book projects, Frazier began with more behind-the-scenes work at a title-search company in Honolulu, translating deeds, land conveyances, wills and adoptions. She found the work interesting, and it fit in with her schedule as a wife and mother.
“I always did it on my own. Whenever anybody asked me to do something, I got it done and got it right back — with my invoice,” she said with a wink and a smile.
It seemed like natural preparation for her three-year stint as the Hawaiian translator at the Hawai‘i state archives, work she found very interesting. “The business of the Hawaiian kingdom was conducted in the Hawaiian language,” she said, noting that there are many documents still un-translated. But now there are people besides her who will be able to do it.
Surprisingly, Frazier was mostly self-taught in the language. In the early years very few Hawaiian-language classes were available statewide, and in those attendance was sparse.
“I don’t have a degree of any kind,” she said. “I never cared — didn’t make any difference to me. I’m a reader. I have a huge vocabulary, and so it didn’t bother me.”
Though people often sing her praises for her contribution to the renaissance of the Hawaiian language and culture, she doesn’t see her involvement as that big of a deal.
“I never consciously set out to impress. I just was interested in the work and what I was doing,” she said. “What’s the fuss?”
Nogelmeier explains that Frazier’s deflection of praise is more than just an accomplished woman being modest, but a cultural norm. “In the Hawaiian perspective, all the good things she did, she certainly didn’t do alone,” he said. “It’s not false modesty — it’s a different world view.”
That being said, Nogelmeier remarked that Frazier’s willingness to be so accessible and to give her time to so many people over the years is what makes her remarkable. “That’s why so many people love her,” he said. “She’s well-respected.”
She’s slowed down a bit in recent years, needing to stay close to home to care for her husband of 65 years who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
She’s still works a bit on her memoirs, occasionally writes spunky letters to the editor, and recently helped research the name for the new police department headquarters in Lihu‘e.
It’s called “Ka Hale Maka‘i O Kaua‘i,” or “The House of the Kaua‘i Protectors.” Frazier notes with amusement that people still just call it “the police building” (or “the cop shop” in reporter lingo).
“I don’t think I’m a trailblazer, but I was ahead of the movement,” she said. “I never thought about it. I was doing what I was obviously meant to do.”
Pamela V. Brown is a freelance writer who lives in Kapa‘a.
