Posts filed under 'Endangered languages'

“Vulnerable” Languages: An Interview with Jim Dingley and Petra Reid

July 20, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before.

The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and  postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation? 

Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.

I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.

Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.

Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.

I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.

DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?

PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.

That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “a wicked king” by Lucia Marchetti

March 23, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe and Ligia Pelosi

With Italy in lockdown again as it battles a third wave of COVID-19, Lucia Marchetti urges hope in the following response to the pandemic.

For two and a half months last year, we curated the series: In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak, featuring writers from Argentina to Portugal to Hong Kong. One year on, with Italy in lockdown again as it battles a third wave of COVID-19, we present another piece responding to the pandemic, tinged with hope, by Italian poet Lucia Marchetti in the endangered language of al djalètt pramzàn, spoken in the province of Parma in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. This poem was published as a voice recording by local newspaper La Gazzetta di Parma at the pandemic’s outbreak last year. Co-translator Julia Pelosi-Thorpe writes: “In it, Marchetti describes COVID as the crown (wordplay with ‘corona,’ ‘crown’ in Italian) on the head of a wicked king. This poem is co-translated by me and my mother, Ligia Pelosi. She grew up near Parma, and migrated with my nonni to Naarm (now known as Melbourne), where I was born, as a young teenager. After I produced a first full draft, my mother and I listened together, capturing any missed or misheard words. I then revised the piece into a final draft.” 

 

a wicked king

reviews a not-too-distant world

a bad king 👑corona👑 on his head

sowed death

among humans

swelling like a moonlit tide and all

the population were divided friends

and kin watching one another from a distance

here a situation very grey yet king

with his 👑corona👑 still advancing

advancing bringing grief and ruin

and bit by bit the people were dismayed

then when they really understood

their lesson all was suddenly recalled

so many seaside trips recalled lovely trips

up and down the mountains and their unrest

to find a place to live a cornucopia

they realised happiness had

been close in so many moments

wishing to go back

from the bottom of their hearts feeling the burst again

wishing to tell all they love them

to embrace the first person found along the street as if a cousin

to celebrate a life renewed

 

Translated from al djalètt pramzàn by Ligia Pelosi and Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe

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Bringing the World Into the Classroom: The Winter 2020 Educator’s Guide

March 4, 2020  |  in Asymptote for Educators  |  by Barbara Thimm

One focus of these lesson plans is that students engage in deep thinking and writing, another is to connect reading with their own experience.

Often, our love for literature is catalyzed by a journey taken within a classroom. No matter where and how we teach literature, it is always an opportunity for our students to engage with their world in a new way. The Asymptote Educator’s Guide is a resource we’ve developed to facilitate more of these expeditions, bringing important, diverse works from our issues into the classroom by way of a curated and detailed guide for teachers. In the following essay, Barbara Thimm, Assistant Director of Asymptote’s Educational Arm, discusses the immense potentials and applications of the Winter 2020 Educator’s Guide.

Jerome Bruner, the famous cognitive psychologist and one of the most important contributors to the theory of education, likened reading to a journey into new terrains without the help of a map: “As our readers read, as they begin to construct a virtual text of their own, it is as if they are embarking on a journey without maps.“ Yet that emerging virtual text is shaped by our previous reading experiences, “based on older journeys already taken . . .” Eventually, that journey becomes a thing of its own, a generator of new maps and thus an extension of the reader’s world, an addition to her repository of maps.

World literatures are particularly apt in expanding their readers’ collections of maps, that is, to enrich their reading of the world, not only literally in the sense that they raise awareness of writing and thinking in parts of the world more likely to be “known” via externalized news reports, if at all. Through their defined difference, world literatures confront us with names, places, and narrative patterns that are farther removed from the “older journeys already taken,” and thus extend the routes we can travel in the future. It follows that world literature can be made uniquely productive in encouraging our students to expand their horizons by adding to the variety and reach of their reading maps.

Asymptote’s mission, “to unlock the literary treasures of the world,” thus becomes a rich resource for a variety of classrooms in the English language arts, not least because the vast majority of the pieces published here are contemporaneous—that is, they reflect the thinking, storytelling, and creativity of artists writing in our present moment. Often, these texts are not part of a canon, nor can they be found in print outside their countries of origin. What they have in common is that someone who speaks both English and the language of the original artist found them worthy of her or his attention and effort, and brought them forward so that we may connect their ideas, experiences, and visions of the world to ours. Bringing these voices to the attention of our students is an ever more urgent endeavor in a time where nationalist interests and perspectives crowd out more unifying visions.  READ MORE…

A Blazoned Book of Language: Poems from the Edge of Extinction in Review

December 11, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

The poets in this collection are intensely alert to their struggle, focusing on their work on the language's vulnerability and change.

I am beginning to write in our language,
but it is difficult.

Only the elders speak our words,
and they are forgetting.

So begins “C’etsesen” (“The Poet”), written in Ahtna, an indigenous language of Alaska, by John Elvis Smercer. In 1980, there were about one hundred and twenty speakers of Ahtna. At the time of this poem’s publication in 2011, there were about twenty. Today only about a dozen fluent speakers remain. Smercer’s lines reveal his urgent concern with the disappearance of his language and the weight of his task in preventing the language from slipping away. It is a race against time, between generations, for the young to learn the language before the old leave, taking the words with them.

Chris McCabe, editor of the anthology Poems From the Edge of Extinction, has equally set out on such a task: to collect, record, and preserve poems from multiple endangered languages. The anthology grew out of the Endangered Poetry Project, launched at the National Library, at London’s Southbank Centre, in 2017. The project seeks submissions from the public of any poem in an endangered language in order to build an archive and record of these poems for future generations. Of the world’s seven thousand spoken languages, over half are endangered. By the end of this century, experts estimate that these will have disappeared, with no living speakers remaining. Language activism has been growing since the early 2000s, and the United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL 2019) to raise global awareness of the consequences of the endangerment of indigenous languages. McCabe’s anthology, published to coincide with IYIL 2019, contains fifty poems, each in a different endangered language (as identified by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger), presented in the original alongside an English translation; the result is an urgent and illuminating collection encompassing linguistics, sociology, politics, criticism, and philosophy that, in its totality, represents a manifesto of resistance.

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Thirteen Keys to a Doorless House in Toledo: On Tela de sevoya by Myriam Moscona

May 16, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Sarug Sarano

The Ladino language has etched on her tongue the addresses of countless houses in the Jewish Quarters of Toledo and Burgos.

Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya (Onioncloth) was published in English in 2017, translated from the Ladino by Antena (Jen Hofer with John Pluecker). In today’s essay, Asymptote’s Sergio Sarano, himself a Ladino speaker, uses Moscona’s book as a starting point to explore the language and its history, shaped by the complex migrations of the Jewish diaspora. Sergio also discusses Ladino’s current status as an endangered language and highlights the important role that Moscona, as one of just a few writers who continue to publish in Ladino, has to play in keeping the language alive.

“I come upon a city
I remember
that there lived
my two mothers
and I wet my feet
in the rivers
that from these and other waters
arrive to this place”

—Myriam Moscona

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Snichimal Vayuchil: Writing Poetry in an Endangered Maya Language

December 14, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Paul Worley

They insist that they be allowed to express themselves, above all else, in Tsotsil and as Tsotsiles.

As outlined in the controversial fall 2013 editorial from n +1, concepts of “World Literature” or “Global Literature” in translation are continually haunted by circuits of colonial power. Must we begin with Goethe and his Weltliteratur? Must translation practices always be subject to market forces and so dominated by economically powerful languages like English? What is the role of individual multilingual readers who communicate in multiple languages? These questions become all the more pressing in the cases of so-called minoritized languages. Possessing limited access to education and formal literary training within their respective nation states, minorizited languages are by definition disadvantaged with regard to publication and the dissemination within their respective national confines. Indeed, whether the context is the United States, China, or Colombia, despite the tireless activities of linguistic activists, one of the overriding concerns of publication in minoritized languages is who, exactly, constitutes the audience for a text that, more often than not, will be accompanied by a translation into the dominant language anyway?

These are a few of the topics that came up in conversation with the San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, Tsotsil Maya literary collective Snichimal Vayuchil (“The Flowery Dream”) when I sat down with a few of its members recently. Consider, for a moment, the untranslatability of the group’s name. What sounds like an overwrought cliché in English is actually the adaptation of a pre-hispanic Mesoamerican difrasism or semantic couplet, in xochitl in cuicatl (“my flower my song”) in Náhuatl, which reflects an aesthetic conceptualization linking poetry with the natural world as well as entrée into a distinctly non-European set of literary and aesthetic values.

According to Xun Betan (Venustiano Carranza), the group’s founder and coordinator, the group’s mission is to produce a Tsotsil literature that originates from Tsotsil understandings of the world. That’s why, both in their first anthology and in an upcoming English translation of the group’s work in the North Dakota Quarterly, they label themselves “a poetic experiment in Bats’i K’op (Tsotsil Maya).” Betan noted that, unlike Maya K’iche’ and Yucatec Maya, languages whose pre-Hispanic literary traditions were recorded in the colonial Popol vuh and the Books of the Chilam Balam, respectively, there are no Tsotsil language colonial documents that reflect what we would call a Tsotsil literary tradition. The group sees its work as being more “experimental” and much less proscriptive than the traditional literary workshop setting, as they explore Tsotsil language as a medium for literary expression. For readers already well-versed in US Native American literature, this situation is not unlike the one described by Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko when she asks, “What changes would Pueblo writers make to English as a language for literature?” with the key difference here being that these writers are undertaking this work in their mother tongue. READ MORE…

In Review: Xtámbaa—Piel de Tierra by Hubert Malina

July 5, 2017  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

Paul Worley reviews the first volume of poetry to be published in the Me’phaa language of Mexico.

In a 2015 Washington Post article on the state of world languages, Rick Noack and Lazaro Gamio note that of the roughly 7000 languages currently spoken on the planet, almost half that number—some 3500—are expected to die out by 2100. Although the authors themselves do not make such a connection, when they state that “Linguistic extinction will hit some countries and regions harder than others,” the areas they designate as those that stand to be hardest hit (Native American reservations in the Western and mid-Western US, the Amazon rainforest, sub-Saharan Africa, Oceana, Australia, and Southeast Asia) coincides roughly with a map of where global capitalism has increasingly sought to expand its reach into indigenous communities during the first few years of the 21st century. As evidenced by conflicts such as #NoDAPL in the US and the dynamiting of a sacred Munduruku site to make was for a dam in the Brazilian Amazon, the extinction of languages and cultures all too frequently goes hand-in-hand with state sponsored development projects that forcibly eject indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands in the name of national progress. When one comes to an understanding that language death is as much an economic as it is a cultural phenomenon, where do indigenous peoples, cultures, and languages fit within 21st century nation-states, if at all?

In comparison with many other countries in Latin America and the rest of the world, contemporary indigenous literatures from Mexico are notable precisely for this delicate dance between the Mexican state, a major sponsor of indigenous literatures since the late 1970s, and indigenous authors whose literary, linguistic, and political aims tend to diverge from those of their state-sanctioned patrons. In particular, the bilingual format of virtually all indigenous literatures published in Mexico during the past 40 years speaks to the realities of a complex relationship in which authors seek to represent themselves to themselves and their communities in their native languages, while simultaneously making these same selves intelligible to non-indigenous outsiders living in their same country.

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