Literature and the Indians

Cuzcatlán, the title of Manlio Argueta’s new novel, is the old Indian name for El Salvador. In our own United States literature, names like that used to crop up often a century and a half ago: “Hiawatha,” “Chingachgook.” Unscrupulous poets seized on Iroquois syllables to solve all the problems of English-language prosody. Whittier was always going on:

Cranberries picked in the Squamscot bog,
And grapes from the vines of Piscataquog

We ...