Finding the Center

Dennis Tedlock is James H. McNulty Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books include Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya.

"A brilliant gathering of Zuni narrative poetry . . . Tedlock's Zuni narrators seem like singers of some pueblo Beowulf, orchestrating oral traditions with voices they use like instruments."—Newsweek "[An] extraordinarily impressive collection."—New York Times Book Review "A genuine artistic breakthrough . . . Recapture[s] for us not only the communal spirit of the stories but also . . . at least some feeling of what it's like to be a Zuni, something anthropological monographs can't seem to tell us. . . . I know of no other retellings of traditional tales that move me to delight as these do."—Harper's Magazine Tedlock's book introduces into folklore an attempt to create a verbal notation of the speech dynamics of the original narrators. . . . The realization comes over one with a shock that our infatuation with story has, for all these years, obliterated all but the most rudimentary considerations of style."—American Anthropologist