 Yes, so this is a very good question that should be addressed now. Irma Pineda, who we all know and who I translate into English, we actually have known since July that she wasn't going to be able to come because she couldn't get permission from her employer to let her out of these days working. She teaches in Mexico, and somehow that information wasn't translated to the right person at all to have them taken off, so I do apologize for that, but thank you for mentioning that. Irma Pineda is not here, but now I have a really good idea for what I need to do in order for her to be able to attend next year in the Bay Area, so hopefully that will be possible. And then did you have your hand up? Great. Awesome. Okay. I think we're going to touch on all those things in different ways. Can everyone hear me okay? Great. So again, thank you so much for being the stalwarts at the end. I'm going to introduce my dear co-panelist and myself, and then I'm going to give a little bit of talk about translating Irma Pineda, and then Claire Sullivan is going to talk about her experience translating what became this incredibly beautiful book that I will pass around that was published by David Shook's publisher. And then David is, Shook is going to show us a little bit of a documentary that he's working on about one of the many poets that he translates, and then maybe talk to us a little bit about the process of creating this anthology. So I'm going to pass these both around while I... Are they available for sale? Well, now that the bookstore is... You know, do you have them in your backpack? Do you have more? Am I? For a certain price. For a certain price. There might be one in David's backpack. So Claire Sullivan and I met at ALTA in 2009 in LA, which was the last time I was able to attend this lovely gathering, and Claire invited me to be part of a panel that she organized at that ALTA about translating Mexican women. Oh, and Jen Hopper. And Jen Hopper, who we also met there, was the third panelist at that session. And here we are again. And so David Shook's publishing house, as I mentioned, Phony Media, has just published Claire's lovely translation of Natalia Toledo's 2005 collection, which won a major award in Mexico called Olivo Negro. The English title is Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems. Claire has also translated Books of Pros by both Argentine and Mexican writers. And she is a professor of Spanish and director of a graduate certificate in translation at the University of Louisville in the city where she lives. And she's going to be talking about the process of translating Natalia's poetry. And David Shook is the author of Our Obsidian Tongues, which was published in 2013. He's also the co-founder and the editorial director for both the online journal Molossus and Phony Media, which does both book and other media video production. And you are seeing, as it goes around, one of the results of Phony Media, Like a New Sun, which came out in September. Is that right? No, no. Like a New Sun, I think, is last week of August. Last week of August. That has worked from six indigenous Mexican poets, including at least one or two that we will talk about today. And David has translated into English from nine languages. That's kind of amazing to me, since I only do one. And including several that are native languages and or indigenous or endangered languages. And so he's going to show us a video clip. We're going to be talking also about the ethics of what we're doing and how we feel about that. My name is Wendy Call, and I am primarily a nonfiction writer. I moonlight a little bit as a poetry translator. And I became really interested in indigenous literature in particular. I had never done any translation when I was working on a book about southern Mexico. And I started translating some of the literature of that region as a way of gaining some level of understanding, so that I could write in English about these communities. I teach creative writing and environmental studies at Pacific Lutheran, which is a university in Tacoma. And I am particularly interested in connecting indigenous women writers from Mexico with U.S. audiences in different ways. And as part of that, the poet, Irma Pineda, who I'm going to talk about today, she and I organized a gathering of indigenous women writers, both poets and prose writers in Oaxaca in 2011. Claire attended that gathering. And Liliana actually helped me organize that gathering, Liliana Badansuela, who's here. And then Claire and Irma Pineda organized a second gathering for some of the same writers and poets that was in Chiapas in 2013. And Liliana was there. And Liliana was able to come to that one, yes. And I am currently working on my second collection of Irma Pineda's poetry in English while I, over the long haul, seek a publisher for the first collection of hers that I finished translating last year. So I'm going to... It's not moving forward. Oh, can I... Oh, you can do that for me. Well, it is... No, it's moving forward here. She's not projecting. Oh, wait a minute. Should I go find Irma Badansuela? I'm going to see if I can make this work. So what I have here, here we go. Here's where we are. The little blue star Isuchitan, all three of the writers that we are talking about today are from Isuchitan, which is an Ismus Zapotec community in the Mexican Ismus. Who here has heard of Ismus Zapotec? Yay, most of the people here. So as you probably know, if you are familiar with the language, it was probably the first written language in the Americas. So several hundred years before the Maya started carving their glyphs onto stelae, I should say the Zapotecs were also using a glyph-based system for recording things in Oaxaca. And so this glyph recording system, which some people think of as a language, some people don't, here's an example of it, persisted for 1400 years. It stopped being used probably about 500 years before Europeans showed up in the Americas. And then Zapotec literature kind of went back to being an oral tradition. And then about 120 years ago, Zapotec writers began using a transliterated Latinate alphabet to write down their literature once again. And here we are today with lots of published Zapotec writers. So this is Irma Pineda, the poet, not the only poet, but the primary poet I work with. And Irma was born in 1974, like most Ismus Zapotecs. She spoke entirely Zapotec at home and entirely was educated in Spanish at school. And so she never learned how to write her language. And so she talks about how when she began to create poems, to create poetry, she would do them in her head in Zapotec. And then she would go to friends' bookshelves and pull out Zapotec books, of which there weren't very many, and then look for the words that were in her memorized poems in the books and then write them down. Now this is even harder than it sounds, and I think it sounds pretty hard, because there are five different orthographic systems used for Zapotec, which we could talk about later. It seems like more than you want to know. But one of the things I think is interesting is that the one that now most writers currently working in Ismus Zapotec use, including Natalia Toledo and Victor Teran, was the orthographic system that was come up with by missionaries at the Summer Language Institute. There are four other systems that were all developed by writers, essentially for them to write their own work. So Irma says, I started writing poems in Zapotec without knowing how to write well in Zapotec. I was taught, I wasn't taught to read Zapotec, so I didn't know how to represent the sounds. I didn't have a dictionary. I didn't even have a grammar book. And so one of the things that Irma talks about a lot, let me see if I skip something there. No, there we are. Is that she really feels pressure to only produce bilingual work. But if she wants a readership outside of really her town, then she needs to translate her work into Spanish. And so she talks about how sometimes when she creates a new poem and writes it down in Zapotec, her first thought is, oh my God, now I have to make another poem in Spanish. On the flip side of that, she's published six collections of poetry, all Zapotec Spanish. She has an entire collection that is written in Spanish only that was inspired by European works of literature that she was reading in Spanish translation. So she says she didn't feel like there was any point to write these poems in Zapotec because she thought them in Spanish because they were part of her kind of formal education. And that remains her only unpublished collection of poetry because she's now sort of boxed as you are a Zapotec poet. We want you to be bilingual and to publish everything bilingually. So this is the cover of her fifth collection of poetry, which I will butcher the translation or the pronunciation of do you, I don't know how to pronounce Zapotec. I don't know Zapotec. But the Spanish title is de la clase de lo ombligo a las nueve cuartas. And who in this room does not speak Spanish? Everybody speaks Spanish. Okay, so I don't have to tell you how badly that title will translate into English if you translate it literally. So I do want to mention one of the things I love about this particular collection is that it is available for free download at the website of the institution that published it, which is the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas. And if you Google the Zapotec name, nothing else is called that. So you will go straight to where you can download this book. It is a book of poetry. It has been downloaded 7,000 times since 2008. So pretty amazing readership. Natalia Toledo has one of her books of poetry is available online and it's been downloaded now over 10,000 times. But getting back to the title, do you, the first half of the title, would translate literally as cordón casa or mecate casa, if you, in Mexican Spanish, into English as courthouse. Irma says, you know, if I write cordón casa, no one is going to know what I am talking about. But if I say casa del ombligo, everyone in Mexico will know what I am talking about. Now of course, in English, if I say house of the umbilical, that really doesn't help us at all. So what this refers to is an indigenous custom pretty widespread in Mexico and elsewhere, you know, maybe falling into disuse, certainly falling into disuse, in which you bury a baby's umbilical cord in the, you know, at the home territory, you know, piece of land, garden, so that you will always have this literal, you know, connection between the place you were born and wherever your life takes you. And so these, a lot of these poems in this book are about this connection, both on the literal level and also on a metaphorical level. And so when I translated this term into English for these poems, I used the term lifeline, not because that's what it says in Spanish, but because that's one sense of what it says in Zapotec. And one of the things that Irma talks about a lot in, when she talks about her translation is that she doesn't, I've been using the language wrong, she does not think of Zapotec poems that she wrote and then Spanish translations of her poems. She talks about mirror poems or parallel poems where essentially every poem has a twin, but it's not an identical twin. And so she creates the poem in one language, she, she recreates a new poem in another language that relates the two poems relate to each other. So sometimes I work from, I mean generally I work from Spanish, of course, because that's the language I read, but often I will take things from the Zapotec that are not in the Spanish because I kind of feel like I'm drawing from both of these sort of fraternal twin poems and creating a third poem. So what I have here are the Zapotec published version of one of her poems and then what we call the Spanish literal translation. And where this comes from is I sit down with Irma after I've done a draft translation of a poem using the Spanish. And I have her just tell me what each line literally says in Spanish and I write that down and sometimes they're really, the literal Spanish and the published Spanish are very similar. Sometimes there's only a couple of differences, sometimes there are a lot of differences. And so then, unfortunately I couldn't get this all on one slide because it would be helpful, but here I apologize if this is really tiny. What we have is the English, my English translation, which is very much work in process, I haven't published this poem. Since you left, the Spanish published version cuando te fuiste, the literal version of the Zapotec cuando te fuiste. But as you can see in this case, her published version in Spanish and her kind of literal translation from Zapotec are quite different. And I sort of merge them together in my English, which is still kind of in process. So some of the changes that she makes are really interesting to me. Like, in the Zapotec version, the title and the first line are the same. She didn't do that in what she published. I've chosen to do that in English at the very last line that double my pain. The version she published in Spanish just says that measures my pain. And then the Zapotec version, if you were to translate it, literally says that ways, or that doubles the pain that I have in my heart. And one of the things that she talks about in Zapotec is that you can have emotional pain in different parts of your body. And the part of your body that is referred to when you talk about emotional pain indicates to another Zapotec speaker a different kind of emotional pain. She says that doesn't really happen in Spanish, emotional pain is emotional pain. And so often in her poems, there will be pain that refers to a particular body part, those are always left out in Spanish. I decided to leave it out in English too, but I did include the double. Because I thought that specificity was interesting. And I'll give it, talk about just one more little aspect of, or it's not a little, a big aspect of her poetry and then hand it over to Claire. So there's this really, there was this word that I kept coming up against over and over and over in her poems, which it's in this line that I'm not gonna try and say pronounce in Zapotec. But we have our language molds the gift of our thoughts, which is the English translation of this idea. And so Yirma talks about how this kind of saying in Zapotec has been crucially important to her development as a poet. And so the word that I kept coming across that led her to give me this explanation was that there was this word, or QX, U, E, N, D, A, is how it's used in compounds. And it's often used as a modifier, if it's used as a noun, it's genda. And here you can see just some of the ways that she has translated that word into Spanish and then some of the ways I've translated into English in working with her poems. But the genda is, as Yirma explains it, it is our parallel being in this life, the being that journeys with us through life. If something bad happens to your genda, which is your totem animal, you will be hurt as well. She also talks about how that works on a metaphorical level as well. You are described as having a genda for poetry if you are a poet. Or if you were chosen to do something really important in your community, that is a genda in the sense that it's a gift. It's something that you have been given. And so, sorry, did somebody want to say something? No, I'm just talking to myself. Ah, which is interesting. Yeah, I've thought a lot about the duende, genda, how they overlap and how they don't in terms of how they're described to me. I will say that whenever I have somebody described duende to me, the description I get is completely different depending on what country they're from and what region of Mexico they're from. So it got so complicated I stopped thinking about it. And so this is just one way that she uses this term in my English translation from one of her poems. And here, when she talks about the gift of the jaguar, the gift of the eagle, she's talking about two different Zapotec legends of the ancestors of the Zapotecs, one of which, one ancestor is a jaguar and one is an eagle. And then the last little thing I wanted to talk about in terms of like specific translations and doing it, we're using both different languages. This Galapecnya is the name of a swimming hole in Huchitan. So as you can see in Zapotec, everybody knows that, right? Everybody that speaks Isthmus Zapotec. So we don't have that little epigraph on the poem explaining where the crocodiles abound. And here, and I think Claire actually might talk more about this, because she did a lot of this in translating Natalia's poetry. There are things that get lost when you move to Spanish, because you just can't do them from Isthmus Zapotec. But sometimes we can bring them back in, in the English. And so here, in the fourth line of this poem, the word, the Zapotec word, means both to swim and to lay eggs. Pretty awesome, like double meaning for a verb. Of course, that didn't work in Spanish. So she didn't even try to do it in Spanish. And so that line in Spanish would literally read where the crocodiles laid their eggs. And the Zapotec version of this poem, you can't see it here, because it's in the second stanza. But it also has an end rhyme. And so when I was talking about this poem with Yidma, she said that she really wanted one end rhyme in the English version, because it is kind of a whimsical poem or a poem that has a whimsical aspect to it. And so I reproduced a slant rhyme in the first stanza when I was bringing it into English. And then I also kind of took liberties or combined the two in that one line where the crocodiles' eggs swam, trying to get at that double meaning of laying eggs and then something swimming in Spanish. And I think I will stop there so that we can move along and then talk later. So if you just hit escape, you should get out of there. And then actually, you could just close it. Don't save. Oh, I think it's all three. Because the audio is only getting far. Do we need technical? Do you want to... I don't know if you have any... Is this supposed to be vegan? Yeah, vegan. Okay. Well, translation can be viewed as a cultural and linguistic usurpation. For literature written in indigenous languages, it's a necessity. Indigenous languages in Latin America are disappearing rapidly due to the dominance of Spanish and more recently English and languages of commerce and communication. So many people, even poets and teachers who love their language don't speak it to their children. And the formal educational system does not lend itself to language preservation. Directing materials are published almost exclusively in English. Public school teachers are sent to regions where they don't know the native language. So translation is necessary so people will be able to read literature from their own culture and share it with the rest of the country and world. The question becomes that how to do it well. Of course, there will be losses. In the case of Isthmus Zapotec, for example, the intricacies of sound that include glottal stops and different tones can't be maintained in Spanish or English. But what can be preserved in translation? For Natalia Toledo, her strong imagery that evokes life ways also in peril can be translated. In particular, she represents regional foods of the Isthmus, sacred role of animals in Zapotec culture, customs like weaving, natural medicinal practices, passing on oral wisdom, games that children create. But how can we translate this imagery without infantilizing its subjects or taking out a patronizing attitude to our what could seem equate but antiquated way of life? One way to accomplish this is to try to recapture her vivid and sometimes unsettling imagery in full color. For example, Zapotec people see the natural world and even everyday objects as having body parts. And Irma Pineda explained to me, we talk to things as if they had bodies. We personify everything. We humanize everything. These features that she mentions are very present in her poem, The House of My Dreams. In her translation to Spanish, Toledo manages to capture two of the three images from the original in Zapotec in their subtlety. She has a womb-like cauldrons and a toothless house. But the final imagery of the house as a body loses its complexity because in the original, she uses two different houses, Jew, for the physical structure and the jeep for the home or hearth. In English, I lost the second metaphor because I translated the verse as a house with missing tiles. But I tried to recapture the complexity of house home. Toledo also presents striking imagery when she writes about food. She begins her section of culinary poems with the Zapotec refrain. En la cocina el que juega su sexo tiene buen sazón. I tried to replicate the masturbation metaphor with a hand in the bush makes sweet work in the kitchen. Was that over translation? Michael Cronin in his book Translation and Globalization warms. Translations in minority languages are thus placed in a classic double bind if they allow the full otherness of the dominant language to immerse in their translation, inviting Anglicisms rather than eliminating them, the language into which they translate becomes less and less recognizable as a separate linguistic entity capable of future development and becomes instead a pallid imitation of the source language in translatories. On the other hand, if they resist translation in interference and not for more... resist interference and not for more target oriented communicative strategies that domesticate the foreign texts, the danger is one of complacent stasis. Translation is no longer functions as an agent of regenerative... of regeneration in the target language. So how can we acknowledge the differences among languages and use them to enrich our own language through translation without alienating our reader or exatacizing our subject? Food again provides a common ground in a poem dedicated to Jaime Garcia Toledo describes dishes that don't exist in other regions of Mexico, let alone in the United States. Por la noche de las las ayudas y garnaches. At first, I tried to describe the foods and so I said for the frisbee-sized tortillas and small corn tortillas filled with meat and cheese. But then I realized that the names of Oak Regional dishes that are unique and that images can be found with simple Google searches. So I settled for the nights spent eating clayugas and garnaches. Another way to try to preserve the original Zapotec verses is to acknowledge and play with the differences in sound between Zapotec and Spanish and English. Conan warns again and I quote thus the radically dissimilar lexical, syntactic and phonological structures of Irish are ignored as they question, as are questions of illusion, resonance, and intertextuality. Though he's talking about the translation of Gaelic or Irish literature, the same features can also be examined in the translation of indigenous languages in other countries. Take sound, for example. Since it's a tonal language that frequently employs glottal stops, Zapotec sounds nothing like Spanish or English. The sounds of Zapotec poetry or the sound of it is what attracts listeners around the world, even when they don't understand it. As translators, we can't simply settle for relegating that essential element of poetry to the trash heap. But how can we account for differences in sound and still create poetry in English? For the most part, Toledo has translated her poetry without considering sound directly. She has recreated images, scenarios, witticisms, conflicts without consciously trying to recreate sound. I've tried to go back to the original Zapotec and listen carefully to the rhythms, rhymes, and near rhymes. But my gains have been very small. For example, in her poem... Oh, boy, can I say it. Guacalagi nizaneo nalagidi. The first line reads... Guacalagi nizaneo nalagidi. The words gui and gui, one of them has a apostrophe at the end, are near homonyms because they sound almost alike, especially for a non-native listener, but mean two different things, flowers and stones. And the Spanish, desee caminaras conmigo en las flores, pero también en las piedras, doesn't respect that repetition. So after much deliberation, I settled on, I wish I could walk with you on petals but also over pebbles. It's imperfect, but sometimes we can only be aware of where we're falling short as translators. So as Cronin points out, there are other factors to consider in translation, one that can prove helpful in conveying Toledo's poetry in English's intertextuality. Since the isthmus has long been a crossroads of culture, Toledo, like many other fellow writers, most notably Victor Turan, who David translates, are well-read in moral literature. The final poem of the collection of the Black Flower is dedicated to T.S. Eliot. It contains a line, thank you, contains a line from the wasteland among its verses. It is a gift to English language readers to find a verse from one of the language's most esteemed poems in the center of Toledo's poem, but she doesn't borrow this verse simply to impress readers with her erudition or to honor the member of T.S. Eliot. By borrowing this line and presenting it in Zapotec, she's transforming the context and forcing us to see the words from another point of view. Consider the verse, what are the roots that clutch? What branches may grow out of this stony rubbish? In the context of the poem, Toledo asks what the future of her Indigenous language will be. After Eliot's verse, she adds two of her own. Perhaps I am the final branch who will speak Zapotec. My children, homeless birds in the jungle of forgetfulness will have to whistle their language. Toledo uses our own language to criticize the obliteration of languages through globalization. At the same time, she relies on other languages for the survival of her own. As Cronin says, it is precisely the pressure to translate that is central rather than a peripheral aspect of experience. In this respect, for minority languages themselves, it's crucial to understand the operation of the translation process as itself as the continuous existence of the language. Another factor that enters this translation process from Zapotec to Spanish is the use of Nahuatl. Since Nahuatl is much larger language groups than Zapotec, especially in the capital, Nahuatl words are well known by non-additionist speakers. When Toledo translates terminology from Zapotec to Nahuatl, she makes the imagery more accessible to readers in other regions of Mexico. And the poem, for example Childhood Home that she writes, contains four Nahuatl words to refer to plants, foods, and household items. I kept those words in my English translation though I put them in italics. This choice was made in part to heighten the difference between our culture and Zapotec, but also with full realization that these words would be readily accessible to readers via internet. In fact, three out of four of them pop up immediately as Wikipedia entries. How can we translate in a responsible way that makes our eventual readers aware of the process itself and the risks it poses to the original language? Take, for example, the poem Gie Zuba. The poem bears the name of a flower from the white jasmine or the name of the flower of white jasmine of the isthmus. The primitive name of the flower Itza Shoshitlan which became Shoshitlan and Hushitan the name of the town where Natalia and Irma are from and of the people the Hushitecos. But there's no name for that in Spanish. So she retitled it in Spanish as flower that loses its petals. This name describes what a particular flower does in May during the hot season when Hushitan celebrates its patron festival. But a reader in Spanish or English would not know any of this from the simple descriptive title. So the English title could echo the original title with ismus jasmine and I'm not sure which would be better. There are other references in the same poem that can easily be lost on the trajectory from Zapotec to Spanish to English. One is the a bird that says its name and announces changes in the weather with its song. And if we have time later I'll show you the bird making that song. The translations to Spanish and English lose the meaning. Indeed the translation reveals a severed connection to the natural world. The poem ends thus. Why did you turn your back upon the star that nodded your navel? The word for navel in Zapotec is because it refers not only to a part of the human body but to first house and represents human origins which goes back to Wendy. As Toledo's poetry demonstrates the Zapotec as a people are aware of the body and its functions and to take up the theme I mentioned when I was talking about Ismus Jasmine that echoes through many of her poems and that is the role of animals in the lives of humans. In the poem when that or now while Toledo explains the birth ritual of dividing the animal who will serve as a protector to a child. As I was being born, my father sharpened the tip of a reed and drew the animals that ran through his mind upon the damp earth. The earth told him which would be the lizard. The lizard has a prominent role in Zapotec cosmology since God created the world from the roots of a sabre tree at its center that became a lizard. Another poem that describes the rite of passage that of dressing in traditional clothing to go to the patron festivities also foregrounds the lizard. The poem begins facing the sky like a lizard to show that human beings like animals are subject to the elements invulnerable to the natural world. It ends I'm going to the fiestas to dance and if it rains the heart of the day will hurl a rainbow upon my weepiel and my eyes. When lightning falls the sky burns I open my lizard mouth and drink its fire. Such a metaphor sounds strange in Spanish or English, but this understanding and connection to animals is part of Zapotec world view. Toledo's most recent work is a collection of Zapotec animatapia from both ancient and contemporary culture that she translated into Spanish. This presents a considerable challenge since this was a success of animatapia. How can we account for the difference of sound across language and culture and still convey meaning? The first animatapia in the book brings together the animal world in the culinary realm. Zigi in the mountain Rao Rao in the tree Migucco Migucco in the oya. It's a riddle made of sounds and the answer is an aguana. A normal part of the landscape and died in Huchitan, but who would ever guess the answer to the English riddle? In her translations of animatapia Toledo has not changed the original sounds. For example, the bell tolls and the horse galps garapa garapa garapa. At first I was tempted to change the sounds of the bell to gong or dong in English but the context of the sound is a scene particular to Huchitan in this animatapia memoria sobre el tejado de mi infancia el grito del coccino, el canto del sanate y la campana de San Vicente cuam cuam cuam Though the animals mentioned could be found in rural towns and other parts of the world the bell here is the bell of St. Vincent In the 16th century, Dominican friars evangelized the isthmus and visited Huchitan and renamed it San Vicente de Huchitan with the patron saint of San Vicente Ferrer. The Huchite goes referred to it affectionately as Za Vicente Za, seat or place of in Vicente de Vincent. In the final poem of the book where the verse hinges on wordplay that doesn't exist in Spanish or English dialogue between sisters relies on the fact that the Za Vicente word for sister, fish, serpent and the verb to come all look alike on the page but are pronounced differently so they're heteronyms. Toledo has not even tried to translate this game to Spanish since Spanish and English should not have the tonal differences and glottal stops that account for this variation it might be best to try to find a series of homophones and write a creative transposition instead of a translation which I've been working on. We'll see. Translation, especially from indigenous languages, is always a bartering process admittedly more is lost than can be won after all we're talking about different sound systems, world views and even physical environments but the exchange is still worth the effort since it not only reaches the receiving culture but allows the culture of origin to survive. Thank you. Why don't we go to David and then if we have time I'll show some stuff because I don't want to take any more. Thank you guys. I've been in the company of such great scholars that I don't feel that I belong here. I'm going to start out with a short have a background in linguistics, studying in Oklahoma. Do you just want to open PowerPoint David? Sorry. It's not a PowerPoint. I just want to open up the background working with languages in Oklahoma where we still have 35 Native American languages, most of them are native or fewer speakers and that led to my studying. It started it. Thank you. ______ . It is played by the public elementary school in Huchitan's Orchestra. Thank you. They have it, a little sample of what Victor's work sounds like. Basically, I discovered Victor's poetry in 2008 after having spent some time in a small Nahuatl-speaking village outside of Iguala. Studying the language, Nahuatl, unlike the Moriban languages of Oklahoma, has about 1.5 million speakers across dialects and is the largest indigenous language of North America. I discovered Victor's poetry back in LA, I remember very specifically because it was during college football season, 2008. And almost, like so many I think of our translations, almost immediately translated the poem that I'd found into English, which is the first poem, those are actually two poems in that video, The North Wind Whips, which was very quickly accepted by poetry and appeared in April 2009. And after translating it, I got in touch with Victor by email and I began, because of my experience in linguistics, I had a lot of experience working with languages that I couldn't speak, both in terms of syntax and phonological grammar sounds and how they changed. And so I have quite a collection of Zapotec grammars actually across all sorts of dialects, I'm sure you guys probably do too. But I really began to collaborate with Victor and worked, you know, we had about probably a dozen poems by 2010 when we were invited to tour the UK with two Spanish language poets, David Huerta and Corel Bracho for the Centennial of the Mexican Revolution. And it was on that tour really, seeing in the UK especially I think most people who saw us, we were on tour for two weeks, most people who came to hear us read were not aware that any languages other than Spanish were spoken in Mexico. So there's an incredible novelty factor and Victor's work was incredibly well received. I had the opportunity at that time, while I had met Victor and spent quite a bit of time in Oaxaca and in Zapotec communities, especially in the Sierra, I had the opportunity to hear him read his poetry every night for two weeks, which was great for my Zapotec ear, if you will. And it was actually while we were on that tour in 2010, we gave a reading at the Wordsworth Trust in the Lake District in Grasmere and at the church where Wordsworth is buried and that's where the idea for this anthology actually came from. Sitting on a bench in front of Wordsworth's house, Victor and I were talking about indigenous language poetry in its place in Mexico, something we've been talking about with David Huerta, who, you know, those of you who are familiar with his work, you know, he kind of comes from a very highly regarded dynasty of Mexican poets, he's very mainstream and kind of central. And in talking with him, I began to realize, or I guess my observations were confirmed, that the conversation between indigenous language poetry of Mexico and Spanish language poetry of Mexico was very much one direction. And David, you know, David, while he respected Victor greatly, said, told us explicitly, you know, that he did not consider the indigenous poetry traditions to belong to the same lineage as Spanish language poetry, which was interesting and Victor couldn't agree more. We were on BBC Four and the presenter asked Victor, you know, what does it mean, the centennial of the Mexican Revolution? And Victor said, absolutely nothing, you know, I'm still not free, which was pretty badass, really, you know, to see the presenter's face, you know, a little shocked. And I think at that stage, I had already, and I think especially actually from my experience working with language conservation in Oklahoma, I realized how political and how intensely personal indigenous communities felt about their languages, and rightfully so, when you consider the oppression they've endured. And I began questioning my own role and even what I was doing in translating these poems into English. And I still do that, you know, I think that's a healthy impulse, but I think in conversation with Victor, especially whose I suppose my best Zapotec friend and other indigenous Mexican artists and the poet Juan Gregorio Rejino, our Mazatec poet from this book. For example, I came to realize, and somewhat ironically given, you know, the hundreds of languages that English ultimately crushed here in our own present day United States, that translating these indigenous poets into English gave them an opportunity to sidestep the limitations put on their work by the Spanish speaking poetry community that for the most part ignored them. And to their great satisfaction, I think, they, most of all of the six poets in this anthology, for example, are voracious readers of world literature, most often in translation into Spanish. And I think most all of them consider themselves to be working simultaneously into varying degrees for and within their own communities and within conversation with world literature at large. And audience is something very important to them. I think there's, the other thing is that I wanted to mention about this anthology is that the poets in it really reflect the wide variety of linguistic experience that Mexico's indigenous populations face. There are poets like Victor who kind of like Irma writes definitively in Zapotec and later translates and feels very strongly about it. He won't speak Spanish at home to this day, you know. And then there are poets like the Nahuatl poet who's actually Victor's same age. He speaks Huasteca Nahuatl. And this is actually one of the few poets in here that wasn't translated using Spanish. I co-translated it with Adam Kuhn, a scholar of classical Nahuatl that I actually met on a plane coming back from Mexico City. I saw him reading some colonial Nahuatl documents. And it turned out that he had lived in the same village as me to study Nahuatl. And we struck up a relationship and he was at this point working in the Huasteca and Veracruz and had come across this poet's work. Juan Hernandez, this Nahuatl poet actually kind of like Manuel Puig or some other writers writes simultaneously. You know, he said he doesn't write either version first. He says part of his process is actually almost line by line, word by word or phrase by phrase. And there are significant variations between the two poems. Kind of, I mean, very similar to your examples with the literal cribs and the published translations of Irma's work. He calls it a process of mirroring. He says the languages are like two mirrors that reflect each other. And that to me I think is a really great metaphor for the space that so many speakers of indigenous languages today occupy. You know, they speak Nahuatl at home, but go to school in Spanish. And their thought life lies somewhere in between. There are other poets in this book like Enriqueta Lunes, the Tsozil poet that Claire translated for this book, who didn't grow up speaking Tsozil. Her grandparents and even her parents spoke at home, but in an effort to provide her a better economic future, they very intentionally did not teach her and prioritize Spanish. And when she reached young adulthood, I think at about 16, 17, she decided. You know, it was her language and she wanted to learn it, and she did. And she's an incredible poet. I think the translations Claire's done really speak to that. A few other things that I wanted to mention before I open this up to questions. One is the issue of self-translation, which you guys have both mentioned. I think one thing that I've noticed about some, but certainly not all. And I think we're, you know, we're on this table talking about some of the most exceptional poets writing in Mexico today, in my opinion. But many indigenous poets, because they're forced to translate their own work, the, I mean, the truth of the matter is that they're not Spanish language poets. There is Mazapotec language poets. And they're Spanish, which they learned in school. You know, their, their own translations into Spanish tend to be less dynamic and contemporary than the original poetry itself. It almost has a baroque or kind of faux poeticism to it. And so one of the things that, that I've sought to do in, in editing this anthology, for example, is restore some of the, that contemporary feel of a lot of this poetry. I mean, there's Mikaela Sanchez, a Soke poet who's participated in, in the workshops that, that my two colleagues have put together. She, she has images of like a plane's black box and a Macy's store window in New York and poems about illegal African immigrants in Spain. You know, this is incredibly contemporary poetry. And I guess to end, you know, since we're talking about Spanish as an intermediary language, there's a very interesting project that Victor has embarked upon because of his frustration with the, the one way influence of Isma Zapotec poetry. And as part of his project to continue contributing to the language's vitality and evolution, you know, because I think he's aware that in order for Isma Zapotec to survive, it has to continue to evolve. He is, he's just finished translating an anthology called 40 World Poets. And using Spanish Cribs, he's translated everyone from Kavafi to Lipo to Bukowski and E Cummings. And I thought to end, I would show you guys his, a video of him reading one of E Cummings poems in Isma Zapotec, which I recorded in LA, I guess a month and a half ago? Gen was there, yeah. Sometimes we're on there. Well, it says no signal. Should we ask for questions while we're figuring this out? Yes. Good idea. Sure, we have questions in the meantime. What would you all like to talk about? Oh, wait. Now the time to... Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. We did a reading for some students at 826LA on the west side in Mar Vista. And there are a few Zapotec kids in the audience, which was pretty great. But before that, I took Victor to Venice Beach and he was pretty thrilled about it. The subtitles are true to the line breaks, too, which is why they're a little choppy. So what would you like to talk about? What are you thinking? We've got about 15 minutes. I don't know the language. We don't. That's the problem. Two years ago I did a panel on how to translate from a language you don't know, which was a painful panel. Because it doesn't feel right. And I've always questioned people who did it, and now I'm doing it, but I feel committed to it. And what we do, and Wendy generously introduced me to Irma, because Irma is a teacher as well as a poet. And she sat with me and went line by line with each poem and explained that just the words, literally, but implications, and even stories about Natalia and about the village. She was very open and I need help to do it. And David knows more about the structure and the linguistics, so he's a big help as well. Yes. Some of the things you said have just, for ten years I took students and teachers to Yucatán. And while I'm not Yucatán Mayan's speaker, I certainly became acquainted with many people who do. And one of the best things I've ever did is have a Mayan story teller. Domingo Solpuz is his name, and he published collections of his stories in Yucatán Mayan Spanish. And what we heard here is a wonderful story teller. Without, really, without looking at the Spanish, you couldn't tell the story telling part. And so part of what I see is what you're doing is wonderful. What gives the sounds in all your conveyance, poetry, and the amount of pay is through technology today and YouTube. Now I wish I had picked him and had it up there somewhere. But the other thing that struck me, I wanted to ask you if there's a connection between the templates that Yucatán Mayan writers, is there, because when you said that Zapotec personalizes everything and you talked about amount of pay and personification, I thought immediately there's a focal point. That's what you have. I mean, there are these things. So I wondered if there's a meeting of those indigenous writers, story tellers. I think most or many indigenous language writers in Mexico do know each other. There's actually been some pretty important initiatives lately, even at the field in Guadalajara next month. There is a, you know, what they call in Spanish a Congress of Indigenous Writers where they have a four-day workshop and writers come in from all over the country. It's subsidized by the festival. There's a new prize now in its third year called the Prize for Indigenous Literatures of the Americas. It's a $25,000 prize that switches genre every year. It's judged by panels made up of indigenous writers for the most part. I mean, you guys have some experience in actually having been a part of some of those gatherings. I mean, those initiatives that come out of the book festival in Guadalajara are, you know, inspired by years and years of organizing by indigenous writers. And so there's an organization that right now is not very well organized, but in the past has called the acronym is ELIAC, and it's the Association for Writers Working in Indigenous Languages in Mexico. Irma Pineda was the president of it for a few years, the only woman to have been president. And while she was president, she did a lot of work to get more women writers engaged with it because it had mostly been male indigenous writers. But there is a lot of communication. One of Irma Pineda's books, she didn't write it. She sort of did a two-person anthology with a friend of hers who's a Nahuatl speaker. There's actually a conference or a poetry festival, I'm forgetting the official name, maybe somebody in this room knows it, of all of Latin America for writers working in indigenous languages or poetry specifically that's produced in indigenous languages that's been going on. I don't know for how long, but as long as I've been engaged with this work, and that I know, you know, many collaborations that have come from writers or poets working in indigenous languages in different countries, they met each other at this gathering. You know, it's been in various South American countries. And then there's also, right, after a lot of organizing, they're essentially the Mexican version of the NEA, the short name of it is the Sistema. They give grants that are actually, by giving a local economy much more generous than NEA grants to writers and other artists and to scholars. And so for the, I think starting about five years ago, two of the grants that they give a year are reserved for writers working in native languages. Which is a big deal, because for years like those writers were all just shut out of that process. And now there's actually like dedicated spaces for them. Of course two isn't very many out of the 50, I think it's 50 that they give. But there's a lot of communication and one of the things that's interesting about that collaboration of these different communities is of course it all happens in Spanish. So Edma talks about how sometimes she feels like putting a lot of energy into those things means actually less energy going into her Zapotec work because all that work has to happen in Spanish. I think your point about multimedia and technology is an important one too. It's always been a part of Phoneme's mission as much as our aesthetic. Online we have videos from three of the six languages in here and audio recordings from a couple more. I think what's even more exciting though is to see the way that young Zapotec speakers for example are using technology to create in their own languages. I think of there's a great group now and you can look them up on YouTube called Hoochee Rap that these teenagers they're like 14, 15 years old and they rap in Ismus Zapotec. There's another pirated edition of Spider-Man that was just published as a comic book translated into Ismus Zapotec. There's a lot of these initiatives happening among young people who are getting excited about their language. Juan Gregorio Rejino the Mazatec poet is putting together a world indigenous poetry congress and I just talked to him he was just in LA last week and it was originally scheduled for February of next year but he thinks more realistically it will happen in the fall. I think the biggest obstacle to more of that happening really is the financial considerations involved. Were you thinking of where? In Mexico. Okay. You had another question. I'm sorry, did you want to say something? You were mentioning the 14-year-old rappers. I've seen that. Yeah, that's great. And she has a video of some stuff he done a lot. I'm not sure what it is. Cool skull. You know, say Michael Jackson. She has an information she knows. You had something to say about the other question? I know some individual efforts that have happened. There's a Lumi writer who used to live in Seattle, which is where I live, who spent two years in San Cristóbal and got to know a number of indigenous writers at that time. Her name is Shenawa Igawa. And I think what David says is true that she essentially stopped doing that work because there's no support for it. And it has to be a labor of love. And I know, at least in the case of Shenawa, her energies are pulled in many, many different directions and I hear her talking about some of the same things I hear Inma talking about. It's like, okay, am I going to contribute to this larger community? Am I going to contribute to my community? There's just a lot of different demands on people's time, I think. And then I also wanted to pass this around. Going back to the earlier question about multimedia, this is one of a wonderful series by a Mexico City publisher, Prolalia, that they have. This is a book by Irma Pineda that has a CD in the back. So it finally will Spanish the whole thing and then there's all the audio in the back. And I am... Actually, Erika Thalunis, who's in Like a New Sun, also has one of the Mique Sanchez, has one. And they're planning to do more and they're hoping to actually maybe move toward being able to have trilingual editions, including English that would be marketed outside of Mexico. But the CD, you know, is crucial. And for the first collection I have of Irma's poetry, I had her come up to, which hasn't been published, I had her come up to Seattle and we recorded in a studio all the poems in all three languages, because I do think that there is so much that you lose, especially with the tonal language, so at least the audio is a way to not lose all of it. And those Prolalia editions are... You can buy them through their website online. They're beautiful. They're incredibly well done. So you had a question, yeah. You mean by struggling, you mean the same power struggle? Do you mean in terms of power? What do you mean by the, it's not the same struggle? Mm-hmm. I have one anecdote that kind of speaks to that. I think that's mostly true. When Victor and I did that tour of the UK, the Poetry Translation Center in London, printed a beautiful chapbook that we sold at the tour. And when Victor got back to Uchitan, he was so proud, and all of his friends were so proud that he'd been translated into English, that he actually made a pirated copy of his own chapbook in an edition of a thousand, I think. And people all wanted them. They couldn't read them. But the sense, they don't feel as though they're being linguistically oppressed by English. In fact, they felt like it was celebrating their language. Whereas, you know, nobody, unfortunately, is rushing out to get Victor's books in Spanish, you know? So there definitely is a different relationship. Although, you know, English is, like I said, the kind of irony, because it's responsible for so much linguistic attrition around the world. It really had a question that we probably... Yeah. One more question, and then you're welcome to stay in chat, but we don't want to keep you in this 520. Yeah, the power of relations between languages are not fixed as a bit of a context, whereas here, Spanish sometimes is viewed as the love of the language and there's a struggle to have it be acknowledged and respected. These are the English, the Mexico, the indigenous languages are struggling against Spanish, and I thought it was really interesting to thank them by passing the Spanish gatekeepers and going directly to English to a pressure translation that would put themselves right into going into their non-language language. Yeah, and I think it's important to note too that that same struggle is happening here, you know? And LA has the largest population of Zapotec speakers outside of Oaxaca, and they're still very much engaged in that struggle. How many? I'm not a poet. I am. David is. I think that rhythmically, English has something that's different than that it feels to some languages in Mexico. I mean, I can't speak for a long time. Eventually, even if I more than you've done that before, then I just really felt that there's something rhythmically about that lot of stuff that I'm still searching for by working in English, but there's something about that rhythm that's different than English that appeals more to indigenous. There might be Etoa. It could be just something intuitive because I know that art is a sensory form of communication and so there's something about music and rhythm that's not something explicit, and I don't know what you're all talking about in terms of the power of that. But I do think that there's something poetic about it. But in hearing the translation, the English read with the translator like the way with a four, for example, like that may help if that's heard in a language where the rhythm will make more sense. And I say that because I know some Spanish and German, like they talk about the awkwardness themselves in the language that's totally different from rhythmically different from how they read. Well, it might be Neda and other Zapotec writers that I've talked to and in a tiny way translated, and I'd be interested to hear what you two have heard. They all talk about how their poems sound more familiar to them in English than they do in Spanish and that sonically English and Zapotec are closer in a lot of ways than Spanish and Zapotec are. And so, I mean, I'm speaking of total ignorance in terms of the linguistics of it, but it's interesting to me sometimes things that get abandoned in moving to Spanish like I can get back pretty easily. So, yeah, I think that there are, you know, obviously there are a million different ways that languages are similar and dissimilar to each other, but it's also interesting to me as there's now a growing population in Los Angeles and elsewhere of folks that speak Zapotec in English but not really Spanish. It'll be interesting to see what starts to happen as we have a community that's bilingual that way, you know, without the Spanish. There's actually, I just heard last week in LA there was a concert of rock and rap with indigenous Mexican languages and there's actually a booming mixtec rap scene in Fresno, California. Well, thank you so much for coming.