Note 303 — XX.—THE HULA OHE
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Footnote 303: (return)
Kalu-kalu o Kewá. Kalu-kalu may mean a species of soft, smooth grass specially fitted for sliding upon, which flourished on the inclined plain of Kewá, Kauai. One would sit upon a mat, the butt end of a coconut leaf, or a sled, while another dragged it along. The Hawaiian name for this sport is pahe’e. Kalu-kalu is also the name applied to “a very thin gauze-like kapa.” (See Andrews’s Hawaiian Dictionary.) If we suppose the poet to have clearly intended the first meaning, the figure does not tally with the following verse, the fifteenth. Verses 14 and 15 would thus be made to read:
I desire the kalu-kalu (grass) of Kewá, That is riding the surf of Maka-iwa.
This is an impossible figure and makes no sense. If, on the other hand, we take another version and conceive that the bard had in mind the gauze-like robe of kalu-kalu—using this, of course, as a figure for the person clad in such a robe—the rendering I have given,
I pine for the sylph, robed in gauze, Who rides the surf Maka-iwa,
would not only make a possible, but a poetic, picture. Let the critical reader judge which of these two versions hits closer to common sense and probability.