Translation

E'e'aah: sunset, the sun is setting.

The cardinal points:

Ha'a'aah: East: Thought
Shádi'áah: South: Plans
E'e'aah: West: Life
Náhookos: North: Hope


Shił hózhóní
(the Area) is beautiful with me.
Nił hózhóní
(the Area) is beautiful with you.
Bił hózhóní
(the Area) is beautiful with him/her.
Nihił hózhóní
(the Area) is beautiful with us (2)/you (2).
Nihił dahózhóní
(the Area) is beautiful with us (3+)/you (3+).

Everyone is deeply concerned with the Mayan Prophecy and the end of days. I've been told not to expect the end of days, only the end of the time of struggle.

The Hopi say: remove the word struggle from your vocabulary.

The Navajo know the way to approach evil is to acknowledge its existence and to step away. We must not pour our energy into becoming destroyers. The world is full of destruction already. Our way is to restore balance. Hózhó. Beauty. Harmony. Health.

Begin in the east with the time of infancy, birth. Move toward the south, entering childhood. Taking on responsibilities we move west. As we age, we know life continues. The black north is a place of hope.

"'Spain,' said de Foxa, 'is a sensuous and funeral land, but not a land of ghosts. The home of the ghosts is the North. In the streets of Spanish towns you meet corpses, but not ghosts.' He talked about that odor of death that pervades all of Spanish art and literature." (Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt)

Several people have explained to me that life is a route to death. We are born and there begins our journey. Death: the destination. Everyone goes there, we may meet along the way or we may sojourn alone, but eventually we arrive among them, the dead, our future.

I know several books translated from Navajo into English, one into Gaelic, but none into Spanish. Bringing these worlds into contact has passed. We live with the consequence. Our lives our different: Diné Bizaad and Español. Translation has been difficult. We have lost many in the process. They choke. They transform. The think they can exist in one and not the other. They are right. They are wrong. We hold several things in the balance. We must take several things into consideration. Philosophy is esoteric. At the same time in the same place, we understand—land, direction, Telos—differently. Sometimes those differences are fundamental. A silence we must account for, and allow, in our transcription of the music.