There are many ways to tell a story, and "Ka Mo'olelo O Hi'iakaikapoliopele" ("The Epic Tale of Hi'iakaikapoliopele") — with 10 Hawaiian language versions and an English retelling — is no exception.

Here's the off-the-cuff synopsis spun by University of Hawai'i Hawaiian language associate professor Puakea Nogelmeier, 53, on a warm morning just before Christmas in his office in UH-Manoa's Spalding Hall:

"Pele decides to sleep. And in her sleep, her spirit hears drums and is drawn by the drums, the voices of the hula, tracks them, and then sails out of the island, flies over the channels, and finally gets to Kaua'i, where she enters the court of Lohi'auipo. He's the handsomest man in the island chain, of course. So she enters the court of Lohi'auipo in the grandest of forms and falls in love with him. To make a very long story short, they have an affair for three days. She says to him, 'I'm leaving now. Someone will come for you.'

"So she goes back home and asks all of her sisters. And they all say, 'No, you got him, you go get him.'

"The last sister says, 'OK, I will go.' So (Pele) gives her increased magical powers and sends her on a quest to bring Lohi'auipo back. So this is the adventure quest of her going. ...

"When she gets there he's dead. His spirit has been taken by these mo'o women. So she has to restore him, bring him back to life, and then guard him and bring him back home. By the time she gets back home, Pele has lost her patience and killed the sister's best friend. She just went into a rage and burned the forest where the friend lived. Hi'iaka, instead of handing over the lover, makes love with him on the edge of a crater in front of Pele. And then all hell breaks loose."

This spring Awaiaulu Press is publishing Nogelmeier's English translation — the first ever — of the Hawaiian epic. It's a flowing, chant-like work of prose poetry, accompanied by the original Hawaiian text.

Pele's errant baby sister is Hi'iakaikapoliopele, "Hi'iaka in the bosom of Pele," so named because, as the story goes, when Pele fled her home in Tahiti after an exceptionally volatile family feud, she cradled her youngest sister, so young she was still in an egg, against her chest as she rode to the Hawaiian archipelago.

All this and more can be found in Nogelmeier's translation. It's been 100 years since the Hawaiian-language version appeared in print in definitive form, serialized over a two-year period in a then-thriving Hawaiian-language press.

The history of Hawaiian-language newspapers is Nogelmeier's specialty — one he's developed over the two-plus decades since he joined the Hawaiian language faculty at UH, first as a student, then as a teacher.

The forthcoming publication of "Ka Mo'olelo O Hi'iakaikapoliopele" is an outcome of the Awaiaulu project begun five years ago by Nogelmeier and the late construction magnate and philanthropist Dwayne Steel, who was deeply committed to Hawaiian cultural restoration.

Since the 1990s, Nogelmeier had been busy designing Hawaiian-language texts for instructional use in immersion schools and UH classrooms.

"Dwayne came to me and said, 'Who's making books for grownups?' " says Nogelmeier.

PROJECT BEGINNINGS

At the time, you could "get a degree in Hawaiian language and never see a book. It's microfilm printouts; it's stuff off the computer that the teacher gave. Nothing was bound and buyable," Nogelmeier says.

After producing a bilingual edition of Samuel Kamakau's "Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii," the two turned their attention to the enormous quantity of untranslated Hawaiian-language newspapers on microfiche in the state archives.

This led to the founding of the Hawaiian Language Newspaper Project in 1997. Nogelmeier found a trainable optical character recognition program originally developed in the Soviet Union, one that had already proven its adaptability for Polynesian languages via a similar project with Maori texts. Using the program, Nogelmeier and a few of his students began to scan newspapers from the late 1800s, converting them to HTML texts in a searchable database hosted by UH. But there was one problem.

"What we kept seeing is that no matter how accessible we make this, none of this data is hitting the English-speaking population," Nogelmeier says. "So again, Dwayne came back and said to me, 'What are you going to do about it?' And so we talked, we set out to do the same kind of effort, to produce books, take historical resources and try to make them accessible today, but do it bilingually."

"Hi'iakaikapoliopele" is the first project of this nature to come to fruition.

Nogelmeier and his collaborators took a further step toward mass accessibility with their decision to illustrate the volume.

After soliciting work from several local artists, they came to a consensus on Solomon Enos, the prolific painter whose serialized graphic novel "Polyfantastica" runs in this section on Sundays.

The collaboration proved difficult but worth it.

"There's an interesting set of boundaries there," says Nogelmeier. "You know, where's the boundary between artistic freedom and historical necessity?"

Enos' work is strikingly imaginative, but the translators felt pressure to avoid anachronism. "(The artwork) has to reflect the clothing styles, the housing styles. We're doing a feast — we can't put silver teacups, for instance. There's just a necessity of certain representation."

TURNING THE TABLES

Enos responded to the translators' exacting demands in a novel way: He handed them pencils and paper and asked them to draw.

"They went beyond their threshold of fear, a lot of people are just really afraid to do those kinds of things, and they just provided me with these drawings," says Enos. "It was really interesting — each translator had a drawing that was a little bit different. So each translator had a different version and between those different sketches, I was able to sort of navigate."

"He made us draw," Nogelmeier says. "And the three of us who were working on the translation are some of the most inept drawers you've ever met. We did stick figures. We did a vote between us over where we thought illustrations should be, what were the important pieces. And then we did stick-figure drawings of how we saw a particular scene happening."

For Enos, the extra effort paid off. "I wonder how many of these kinds of projects I can fit into my lifetime," he said. "I would love to do that for the rest of my life, because there are thousands of stories. We're just scratching the surface. And every story that I get the opportunity to work on, I'm totally immersed."

The first, limited edition of the book, tentatively scheduled for a late-April release, is priced for collectors. A run of 300 boxed, two-volume copies, with hand-sewn goatskin covers, costs $1,500. A run of 500 slip-cased, fabric-bound copies is $300 each. A $40 trade edition will follow in early May.

"Hi'iakaikapoliopele" will be the first of many Awaiaulu projects, as it sits atop an enormous number of stories awaiting translation in the newspaper archives. Hawai'i was unique among Pacific nations in the sheer volume of written work it produced.

"Partly it's a historical quirk," says Nogelmeier, "because Hawaiians had been exposed to the technology of literacy. For 40 years they'd been watching — captain could write down what he wanted, give it to John A, who gave it to John B, and John B knew what he thought without anybody saying it. That's high technology. They watched it happening, they're fumbling with it. And in 1820, suddenly there was a group that was willing to negotiate that.

"The king announced, 'My nation will be a nation of literacy.' ... It was adopted here as both a national and individual movement. And Hawai'i had its independence, so it could fulfill that. They could set their own goals, and that became a goal. And within about 20 years, they achieved literacy."