Seven Poems

These poems by Juana Peñate Montejo were written in Ch’ol, a Mayan language spoken by a quarter of a million people in southern Mexico and diasporic communities in North America. This selection of seven poems, from Peñate’s collection Isoñil Ja’al/Danza de la Lluvia (Dance of the Rain), references the difficult experience of those immigrating north from Chiapas. The collection won the 2020 Premio de Literaturas Indígenas de América and is being published by University of Guadalajara in Ch’ol with Peñate’s self-translations in Spanish. 

Our work—between a linguist who works with, studies and speaks Ch’ol, and a poet, who translates from Italian—began with listening to Peñate read her poems. From there, we did a word-for-word translation—a gloss—of each one, and while this first step accurately captured the literal meaning of each poem, it made little sense and conveyed none of the sonority and rhythm of the Ch’ol words. Syntactically and aurally quite different from English, Ch’ol presents unique problems of preservation and authenticity when translating poetry. The dramatic landscape and weather of Chiapas, and the deeply rooted traditions and culture of the Ch’ol Maya people, are embedded in Peñate’s poetry, but we wrestled with the linguistic particularities of the language, such as the indeterminant use of subject pronouns and onomatopoeic repetitions. Translation oscillates between, and perhaps benefits from, proximity and distance, and in this case, it required exactitude as well as a certain suspension of reality and imaginative immersion into a world evoked by the poetry, on the page and in our ears. The length of the lines in each poem was unavoidably different, but, as much as possible, we preserved the number of lines and line breaks. Juana Peñate Montejo does not speak English, but a crucial relationship of trust had developed among the three of us. We sent her recorded translations, which she listened to and said, “felt like her poems.” We could ask for no greater approval than this.