Kumulipo

About the Author

In the note accompanying her 1897 translation, Queen Lili‘uokalani identifies a chanter named Keaulumoku as the composer of the Kumulipo. We do know of a famous composer of sacred songs by that name living in the eighteenth century, but as far as scholars have been able to determine he was born around 1716, just sixteen years after the supposed date the Kumulipo was composed. It is possible that there was another, less-well-known Keaulumoku who composed the chant or that over time people forgot the specific dates and simply assumed that the famous chanter had composed the famous chant; scholars have also speculated that “Keaulumoku” was a title passed from one court composer to the next, rather than the given name of an individual. Martha Warren Beckwith, the author of the translation reproduced here, suggested that the Kumulipo, in the form in which it was eventually written down, was in fact a composite—the work of several different writers, possibly compiled over several generations. There is no record of who might have recorded the chant to create the manuscript owned by King Kalakaua.