Translation

"be'ashniih: I am an authority on it (and thus know how to counteract it)

Authority on it, to be an—(in the sense of knowing how to counteract it; to know how to counteract it)"

Colloquial Navajo: A Dictionary (Robert W. Young & William Morgan)

NB: not the power to enforce
NB: not the power to make sure it is followed through

I am an authority on it, in this view means I have power over it, in the very least by means of making it no longer true, by means of loosening its rein, by means of lifting the yoke, by means of direct action.

"Counteract: vt., to act directly against; check, neutralize, or undo the effect of with opposing action."

Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition (Simon and Schuster)

To then say, I am an authority on poverty, severed relations, and hunger, would mean I have the means to undo the effects of these afflictions, by some opposing action.

Thought. Music. Language. Art.

I have the means to neutralize these conditions via action. I give generously. I maintain relations. I feed the dirt. I feed the Gods.

Be'ashniih. What possibility does this bring for Nations, thoughts, and music? For people and artists? For every one living inside several mouths and several languages? How can we apply our authority, our ability to counteract, to direct action, at the level of recognizing what needs to be done and doing it, to what needs to be seen and seeing it, to what needs to be said and saying it.

Translation

"How shall I respond to another person's suffering?"
"Empathy?"
"To the extent that such empathy is possible it is also sterile, 'What would I have to gain?' Bakhtin asks, 'If another were to fuse with me? He would see and know only what I already see and know, he would only repeat in himself the inescapable closed circle of my own life; let him rather remain outside me."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
(M. Bakhtin, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity)

"to be means to communicate"
(M. Bakhtin, Toward A Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book)

"For any individual or social entity, we cannot properly separate existence from the ongoing process of communication."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)

I spend most of my time reading about people unlike myself in translation from languages I do not speak. I do my best to know them, at least to listen.

I have been silenced by interruption, often, especially as I've had to detail my physical needs to medical professionals who believe patients talk too much and know too little. Last year, particularly, I kept saying "I am a human being and this is my body." My statements were only heard as further indication of my position as a novitiate in medicine.

My reading and life have taught me to attempt to follow the details and to keep those details in mind. Learning, in my house, was a process of observation. I was never told what to do, though I was certainly expected to do something. The content of my actions were to be shaped by the content of my life, which was shaped by the details of my observations.

What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding comes. Sometimes I recognize a turn of phrase, a look, or a feeling in my body I can locate in language. What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding never comes, but I still maintain the conversation, if only in savings.

A world confined to myself is an impossibility, and my idea of torture. I don't want to fuse or dissolve into you. I desire to retain my own shape. I have the same desire for you. In communicating, in being, we can then share those shapes and the changes they make over time and a consequence of experience. I find compassion a better word for this than empathy. It speaks to the level of awareness, the attention to detail, the process of listening and manner of reaching for meaning I pursue.

Translation

Dá'ák'eh: the whole family goes out and works the fields

Every one plays a part in the preparation of the fields. The youngest members are given seeds. "They represent life, innocence and purity." They represent the seeds themselves. They place the seeds into the broken earth—with their own hands. We rely on them. This becomes a part of who they are, these young people working the field with their elders.

As they grow they experience the process and take the prayers inside their mind and soul. They see their family, from toddlers to elders, out upon the earth taking care of it. She takes care of them in return. This a relationship. They have been a part of this themselves, growing alongside the crops, over the years, some years better than others, but always the process of going out and working the field together.

A lot of people say dá'ák'eh means cornfield. One person is responsible for that field. The person with the tractor. They sit on the seat and start the engine. The engine muffles the prayers of the planter. "The tractor prevents families from passing on tradition and precludes family unity." Ha'ní. They say.

When you understand the word in the context of the life it creates you understand that the whole family goes out and works the field speaks to a unique process of cultivation and a particular experience of time and place. The whole family goes out and works the field requires seasons to accomplish. Winter: tools are prepared, seeds are sorted and stored. Spring: we wait for thunder. Prayers are made. People take their feet out on the earth and bring them together. There is a language between the soles of one and the surface of the other. It is spoken at these moments. Summer: everyone is involved, the plant people (weeds and seedlings), the birds and animals who desire food of their own, and the corn tassels that begin to spill from the husks. Prayers for rain abound. Water is life giving the stalks their reach. Fall: within it there is a harvest, a thin one and a big one.

Late in the season everyone is tired. The earth is weary and she needs rest. The tools need rest too. After every empty stalk has been cleared everyone is given leisure. This time we share to relax and relieve ourselves from fatigue. We lie down. We recline. We stretch ourselves into the shape of sleep beneath cloaks of night and snowfall.

All quotes are from Diné Bizaad: Bínáhoo'aah: Rediscovering the Navajo Language by Evangline Parsons Yazzi, Ed.D. and Margaret Speas, Ph.D.

Translation

"Two speakers must not, and never do, completely understand each other; they must remain only partially satisfied with each other's replies, because the continuation of dialogue is in large part dependent on neither party knowing exactly what the other means. Thus true communication never makes languages sound the same, never erases boundaries, never pretends to a perfect fit."
(Wayne C. Booth, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson)

I have found myself in a narrow world. I have always sought an escape. I often find one in language.

Circumstance—ill health, war, and poverty—often leads to a narrowing of worlds. Survivors, of environments that have closed in, share experiences that often result in a code of ethics among the survivors.

They have bonded. You, if you stand outside, cannot understand. They are sure of it. They are right in their understanding. I don't think we can "completely understand each other." Problems derive from the belief that we should never try.

It is not necessary to so completely dissolve the space between us that it ceases to exist.

My world is shaped by bridges, some natural, others constructed over years. Some of these bridges are near. Some require a great and costly journey to even glimpse them in the distance. They change light. They offer a means of travel. Some are rainbows. Some are stone. Others hard metal stolen from the earth, our mother.

I was in Minneapolis when their great bridge fell. Many were injured as a result of neglect. Bridges must be maintained—at a cost. They cannot be erected from bodies that tire and decay. Bodies are not bridges. We should not suffer the illusion that bridges are problems belonging to others—those not I. Even those who rest confident in their refusal to travel anywhere outside their understandings.

Circumstance—health, peace and wealth—often leads to a narrowing of worlds. Celebrants of these circumstances often develop calluses. The thick and hard are insensitive to meaning. Meanings are fragile, subtle and supple. They cannot bear the weight of hate (of oneself or others).

Survivors and celebrants share in this, the development of codes and calluses. We must work on the project of translation (from me and mine, to you and yours) in light of these bonds and in consequence of these calluses. They keep us from hearing and from recognizing each other's speech as language. They leave us incomprehensible, and estranged with nothing to say to each other.

The idea that "we must not, and never do, completely understand each other" offers several possibilities: continuity, responsibility, compassion and patience.

The idea that "we must not, and never do, completely understand each other" also rests on one significant assumption: desire.

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.

Translation

"That one aspect of Bakhtin's style most inseparable from his personality is the developing idea. Its subtle shifts, redundancies, self-quotations—ultimately, its open-endedness—is the genre in which, and with which, he worked. To translate Bakhtin, I suggest, is therefore not only to translate the ideas (they can be paraphrased) but also to reproduce the sound of the open-ended, self-developing idea. This would be his 'conversation in progress,' his dialogue about dialogue, his interlocution with readers who have still to respond." (Wayne C. Booth, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson)

As a writer and language learner I am constantly trying to use the right word in the right way. I also believe, as a language learner, that making mistakes is a form of community service. The more people laugh, the better.

Different language communities take different approaches to correcting mistakes, and maintain radically different stances regarding when you are ready to speak and when you should just learn and listen. I suppose, like child rearing and dog ownership, this really is an artifact of the parent/owner/teacher involved. Some are loving and playful and others authoritative bullies (I include dog owners who let their dogs run and pounce on strangers, because "they love people so much" as members of the authoritative bully kind).

When speaking I don't mind being laughed at, except in English (which is my first language, and the one I am corrected in most, but that's another idea, developing). But in writing I am afraid. I try to get it right and have often asked others (native speakers) to read over work (though none have been willing to, which is another idea, developing), so I don't write some ridiculous twattle that only makes sense to me.

I had a neighbor from Brazil. We'd spend hours talking. I would talk to her in Spanish. And she would talk to me in Portuguese. We'd laugh. We'd be serious. This time, talking together, bridged the 20 year difference in our age, and the dramatic variation of our experience. My wife would sometimes be with us and would answer in English. My friend's daughter would sometimes be with us and she would answer in English too. They found us amusing. When I'd get stuck for a word or phrase I'd ask her daughter to translate. They'd laugh, her daughter and my wife, and tell us both: you are not talking Spanish and you are not talking Portuguese. We have no idea what you are saying.

A few years ago I wrote my first full page in Navajo. It might be a total mess, but it is true to the people speaking (who are a total mess themselves).

I believe in writing—in the oral tradition—taking language for what it is, an opportunity, a translation. But it was only after reading Leslie Silko's Turqouise Ledge that I started to allow myself to write as freely as I speak. To use my language books, my dictionaries, my tapes to work for me in the project of communication. Keeping our languages alive requires us to speak. Keeping them in print requires a willingness to ask others to speak them as well. Most of the work I read is in translation, and every work I read has some French, Spanish, German, Czech, Italian and Polish thrown in, even if only the names, that require pronounciation. I struggle to get my tongue and teeth around them. I feel them. I hear them. I take them in, literally. They, the translators of these works, expect me to know these languages. The languages have enough weight to warrant the expectation—so they go in the translation, un-translated.

I'm writing with that in mind, knowing the languages I work with (learning and speaking) have the same amount of weight in my own life. So they go in too, un-italicized and un-translated.

My developing idea is this: if to translate is not to betray, and all language is communication, then we should make the attempt to reach from one area in language to another. Sometimes those areas are between people, but they are often within a person themselves. Allowing those areas, allowing the elasticity of mind required of reading through, makes translation difficult and rewarding. Attempting an honest experience of these moments between asks more of the world and from ourselves, and requires that we not only speak, but respond.

Translation

"I use words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others or let me be silent."
Samuel Beckett, Endgame

". . .with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human realm. That is not a mechanical problem, but an essential one. . .I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate, or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him."
Aharaon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair

Sometimes I sit and read my dictionary. It's a huge Webster's New World dictionary I was given in grammar school. For a long time I hated dictionaries. You had to spell to use them. I was never a good speller. And while I currently spell better, homonyms are my Nemesis.

But I read. And I read the dictionary to find words.

I didn't start this till I took an Anthropology class while an undergraduate at Cal. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe was our teaching assistant. We didn't have sections but she read and commented on our papers. She was eloquent, uncorrupted and uncompromising. I wanted to impress her. She assigned Malcom X's Autobiography. I read how he taught himself to read while in prison by reading the dictionary. He was like the men in my family—but they never made the changes necessary to claim El Hajj. They staid where they stayed.

I always arrived to class early and sat in the front. I was terrified of flunking out. I still lived at home and attended meetings every night in the city. On the weekends I locked myself in my room to read and memorize. During the week I rode BART to campus and squeezed myself into seats and paradigms. I was always mispronouncing. People had no shame in correcting me. I felt stupid—and often still do, when people correct my English, at the store buying groceries.

For our final we were required to write about home, using several of the texts. I only remember Malcom, Jayne's lecture on the Rastafari and Anthony Garcia's lecture on Urban Indians. (This was the only class I took at Cal, outside the Native American Studies department that even mentioned Indians—except for a cultural Anthropology screening of Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area? I had to leave midway through. I couldn't stand it.)

I'm not sure how I answered the question of home, when my world was bound by the daily journey from house, to work, to class and to meeting, but I know I couldn't speak. I started to go by the tag line: silent. Shaping words was beyond me. I was simply trying to get from one world to another intact. Getting to a meeting at the end of the day was a successful day, getting up in the morning a successful night. The process of translation requires a similar desire: to move from one place to another with something remaining—though it remains changed, it remains nonetheless.

In my experience home is not a place to speak from. Voice originates in the process of transformation and the desire to carry that over—from San Francisco to Cal, from Navajo to English, from here to there and from me to you.

Translation

Mikhail Bakhtin's "works in print can in fact be seen as ripped-out segments of one vast philosophical project. . . on the nature of language, literature and moral responsibility."

My own work, on the page, follows a similar course. My ideas have been shaped by my grandmother's nightly reading of the St. Joseph's Missal and my grandfather's constant songs and stories. I was the bridge between their worlds and the distance was vast, indeed.

"What can be said with certainty is that for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication."

The essence of all human communication.

Considering translation as the essence of all human communication has forced me to allow considerable space in all my relations, a loving attention to ways we can be in the same place at the same time with no shared experience of that moment at all. How then can we speak? How then can we hear? If we understand translation as the essence of communication we need to lovingly tend those spaces, those gaps between everyone involved. Even the me involved, the me that is at once 4 years old at my grandparents side and the me that is now forty years older and without them.

"Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts."

I see people talking at and around each other, often. With no consideration of the boundaries they drag themselves across carelessly and without the slightest caress.

Molloy is my favorite literary figure. Beckett's work always points to a project of words, even for a self that is always a word behind, a thought ahead. The earth surrounding them in a sea of image, of silence, of sound. I desire to share those images and sounds. The necessity of your understanding—is sometimes life threatening. I have survived several of those moments myself.

"These languages are not just the bluntly distinct national languages. . .that exist as the normative materials of dictionaries and grammars, but also the scores of different 'languages' that exist simultaneously within a single culture and single speaking community."

I write in and about English, Black English, Spanish, Diné Bizaad, and Sahnish. But the linguistic issue is more complex. I want readers to understand those complexities; they shape my understanding and experience of the world. Especially when I am speaking in the same national language of my listener only to have them say they can't understand me (not my content, but my words themselves, claiming I have an accent—my accent is only San Franciscan).

"In fact, Bakhtin viewed the boundaries between national languages as only one extreme on a continuum; at the other extreme, translation processes were required for one social group to understand another in the same city, for children to understand parents in the same city, for one day to understand the next."

I ask all of us to consider the reality and implications of this continuum. And acknowledge the way this process shapes the kind and character of daily communication. This world requires sympathy, patience and psychological strength. We must speak and listen with these skills, and this knowledge, always in mind.

"These stratifications of language, Bakhtin argued, do not exclude one another; they intersect and overlap, pulling words into various gravitational fields and casting specific light and shadow. Living discourse, unlike a dictionary, is always in flux and in rebellion against its own rules."

These posts already reveal some of these fields. The shadows and light unique to my own rebellion against the rules.

All quotes are from page xxxi of Caryl Emeron's preface to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8)