New waiata collection opens unique Maori history

New waiata collection opens unique Maori history to all New Zealanders

18 July, 2007
Auckland, New Zealand

The final volume in the largest collection of Maori waiata, Sir Apirana Ngata’s Nga Moteatea The Songs, will be launched this Thursday at a function attended by MP Dr Pita Sharples at Waipapa Marae.

“Nga Moteatea is an invaluable resource and a major contribution to Maori literature. We are very proud to have supported the translation project and this offers an excellent opportunity to celebrate the work of Sir Apirana Ngata,” says Professor Linda Smith, Joint Director of Nga Pae o te Maramatanga, the Maori Centre of Research Excellence, who have partly funded the volume.

Nga Moteatea The Songs: Part Four completes the Nga Moteatea series to provide a very important resource to scholars, teachers and students of Maori traditional music and culture through waiata that have always been a central part of Maori life.

Published by Auckland University Press in association with the Polynesian Society, Nga Moteatea The Songs: Part Four appears for the very first time in English as well as Maori, translated by Professor Hirini Moko Mead, and edited by Jenifer Curnow and Dr Jane McRae. It also appears for the first time with audio CDs of many of the waiata sung in Maori. The recordings have been drawn from the Archive of Maori and Pacific Music at The University of Auckland and prepared for publication by Atoll Ltd.

Dr Sam Elworthy, Director of Auckland University Press, says, “Nga Moteatea is a great taonga – a national cultural and literary treasure. Auckland University Press is enormously proud to be publishing the fourth volume in this collection which features many waiata translated and annotated for the first time. We are fortunate to collaborate with the Polynesian Society on these volumes and grateful to the distinguished scholar Hirini Moko Mead for his tremendous editorial and translation work.”

Over forty years, Sir Apirana Ngata collected hundreds of songs and chants from iwi across New Zealand which have become the complete set of Nga Moteatea The Songs.

Only now, more than 50 years after the death of Sir Apirana Ngata and the publication of his biography by Professor Ranginui Walker, is Sir Apirana’s intellectual contribution to the development of our nation coming to be recognised.

Professor Mead’s translation into English opens the readership up more widely nationally and internationally, as Sir Apirana Ngata and the original translator of Nga Moteatea, Pei Te Hurinui Jones, did not translate part four.

ENDS

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