of the performance than uniformly formatted text in prose paragraphs ever could. Tedlock himself defines ethnopoetics as “a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western [poetic] tradition as we know it now." Dell Hymes On the other hand, Dell Hymes believes that even previously dictated texts retain significant structural patterns of poetic repetition that “are the ‘reason why’” storytellers use pauses in their oral performances (1999, 97–98). Hymes’s ethnopoetic theories focus on repetitions in the grammar and syntax of transcribed and translated texts that he suggest can still be analyzed and retranslated. For example, accordingly to folklorist Barre Toelken, the poetic beauty and power of Native American texts like “The Sun's Myth” have been restored “because a dedicated anthropological folklorist and linguist, Dell Hymes, dedicated a good part of his life to resuscitating a dry, written text collected . . . by a long-dead anthropologist [i.e., Franz Boas] and stored away in a dusty volume” (2003, 122). When Hymes retranslated “The Sun’s Myth,” he recovered the poetic and stylistic devices that were used in the original recorded performance, but which had been lost in the myth’s earlier translation by Franz Boas. Hymes’ ethnopoetics revolves around a conception of narratives as primarily organized in terms of formal and aesthetic—‘poetic’—patterns, not in terms of content or thematic patterns. Narrative is therefore to be seen as a form of action, of performance, and the meanings it generates are effects of performance. Narratives, seen from this perspective, are organized in lines and in groups of lines (verses, stanzas), and the organization of lines in narratives is a kind of implicit patterning that creates narrative effect. . . . Content, in other words, is an effect of the formal organization of a narrative: What there is to be told emerges out of how it is being told. (Blommaert 2007, 216) Also, understanding the native language of oral performers is essential for accurate, ethnopoetic translation of their words into written texts. For example, folklorist Barre Toelken explains that Hymes’s “knowledge of the extant Chinookan languages” helped him to “notice stylistic devices that highlighted certain actions and themes and even performance styles that brought scenes into sharp focus” (2003, 122). In other words, without his knowledge of the native language of oral performers, Hymes could not have placed his ethnopoetic translation of “The Sun’s Myth” within its specific