New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik by Enriqueta Lunez, translated from the Tsotsil by Clare Sullivan, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019
Although there is an increasingly large corpus of Latin American Indigenous literature in translation, these translations seldom make it into print. While the digital medium offers advantages—global circulation, the ability to include audio and video of spoken word performances, the capacity to cheaply reproduce multilingual volumes—print remains a vital avenue for the publication of these works as in many circles it still possesses a prestige that digital lacks. Within Indigenous literary movements themselves, authors tend to set print publication of their works as an important goal, even as they clearly value digital publication as an important and effective tool that facilitates their ability to reach a global audience. Most Indigenous literatures that do make it into printed translations do so in anthologies such as Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris’s In the Language of Kings (2002), Allison Hedge Coke’s Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, or Nicolás Huet Bautista and Sean Sell’s Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories (2017).
Published in December 2019, Clare Sullivan’s translation of Tsotsil Enriqueta Lunez’s work in New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik, is perhaps only the third single-author volume of an Indigenous writer from Latin American to be published in English translation, the other two being Sullivan’s translation of Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (2015), and Nathan C. Henne’s rendering of the Kaqchikel writer Luis de Lión’s Time Commences in Xibalbá (2012). Although the publication of these works over the last decade demonstrates how little Indigenous literature has been translated and how much more work there is to be done in the area, it also shows that interest in reading these authors in translation is slowly gathering steam, as Wendy Call’s translation of selected poems by the Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, In the Belly of the Night and other Poems, is due out later this year from Pluralia. In other words, New Moon speaks to the increasing prominence of these voices in the global literary market.
Hailing from San Juan Chamula in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas, Enriqueta Lunez is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Indigenous literature. Although San Juan Chamula attracts thousands of tourists every year due to its status as one of the region’s most “traditional” Maya towns, Lunez’s work is anything but traditional, and in many ways likely cuts directly against the grain of what most outsiders would expect to find in the works of an Indigenous female poet. The world of her poetry contains not only elements such as the Maya corn garden, grinding stones, and the moon, but also alcoholism, drug abuse, armed conflict in Iraq, and people who dream of being actresses on TV. In doing so, her work does not speak to the reader “from the past,” or from an idealized Maya world, but directly from the twenty-first century’s global milieu.
Reflecting the author’s larger orientation, the twelve poems in New Moon are taken from a section of the same name in Lunez’s 2013 volume, Sk’eoj Jme’tik U/ Cantos de la Luna (“Moon Songs” in English). As mentioned in the translator’s note, these poems ultimately address “how [Tsotsil culture] has been transformed by bumping up against more dominant Mexican and world cultures.” Lest the reader think these are purely negative developments, one should point out that that the women in New Moon are sexually and socially liberated, with a woman in the volume’s final poem thinking,
she must rush to meet her lover
maybe have a drink, two or three
sniff the ecstasy of freedom
of knowing she’s a woman.
The speaker of an earlier poem refuses to accept the persuasive racism that many Mayas confront in the streets of town like San Cristóbal de las Casas, not only re-claiming the pejorative “Chamulita,” or “Little Chamulan,” but defiantly saying,
I am a Chamulita, I tell you
listen to me,
Chamula I will die.
Clare Sullivan’s masterful translation of Lunez’s work speaks to the fact that she is widely recognized as one of the most important, proficient translators of Latin American Indigenous literatures today. For example, in New Moon’s second poem she inverts the subject-object relationship in the lines
mi espalda carga tu maldad
mi cuerpo el poderío de tus brazos
to
your evil bends my back
your mighty arms my body.
Here Sullivan both renders a scene of apparent physical abuse to emphasize the sense of male violence done to the woman’s body, and maintains the anaphora of the Spanish by replacing “mi” here with “your.” Similarly, in the above-mentioned poem concerning the racism encountered by Indigenous Peoples, the Spanish phrase “tu boca dice, chamulita” becomes “your mouth spits out, Chamulita” in English. Here the more forceful “spit” is not only more evocative than “mouths” or “calls me” for the reader of the English-language text, but also presents the bilingual reader of English and Spanish with the conundrum of the same line in Tsotsil, which reads, “me’ chamulita, cha bi’iltasun.” Would this be better rendered as being closer to “spit” or closer to “speech”? This ambiguity across the trilingual text is an interesting way of asserting the linguistic sovereignty of Indigenous languages, as language preservation efforts are under constant pressure to dialogue with dominant languages like English and Spanish while ultimately not being reduced to them.
In keeping with previous Ugly Duckling Presse offerings from the Señal series and elsewhere, great care has been taken in the production of New Moon as a book, as a physical object. The trilingual edition includes all three versions of each poem on the same page in a way that invites multilingual readings across English, Spanish, and Tsotsil, and forces the reader to recognize the existence of each even if s/he cannot read anything beyond the English. In keeping with the notion of linguistic sovereignty, both the translator’s note and the author and translator bios appear in all three languages, a move that refuses to privilege the English-speaking audience of the translated text over readers of Tsotsil and/or Spanish. In this way, the volume seeks an audience that easily accommodates the diverse, multilingual, global cultural environment, from Chiapas to New York, that the people in Lunez’s poems themselves frequently navigate. In publishing this book in this particular way, both translator and publisher have done an exceptional job in bringing Enriqueta Lunez’s work to a wider audience and made an invaluable contribution to ongoing projects that seek to amplify Indigenous voices.
Paul Worley is Associate Professor of Global Literature at Western Carolina University. He is the author of Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (2013; oral performances recorded as part of this book project are available at tsikbalichmaya.org), and with Rita M. Palacios is co-author of Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (2019). He is a Fulbright Scholar, and 2018 winner of the Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. In addition to his academic work, he has translated selected works by Indigenous authors such as Hubert Malina, Adriana López, and Ruperta Bautista, serves as editor-at-large for Mexico for Asymptote, and as poetry editor for the North Dakota Quarterly.
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