{"id":288976,"date":"2012-01-25T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/01\/25\/endangered-language-poetry-in-mexico\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:11:45","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:11:45","slug":"endangered-language-poetry-in-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/01\/25\/endangered-language-poetry-in-mexico\/","title":{"rendered":"Endangered Language & Poetry in Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Shook—who has reviewed for Three Percent.<\/a> in the past—is starting a new project to produce a short documentary film and a five-chapbook set of indigenous Mexican poetry. Rather than explain this in my own words, I asked him to write a short introductory post laying out the basis for this venture. As you can see below, you can help make this possible by donating through Kickstarter<\/a> and at the very bottom I’ve included the trailer for _Kilometer Zero<\/em>, a covertly filmed documentary about poets in Equatorial Guinea._ <\/p>\n

I’ve been writing about endangered languages since 2007, when I co-wrote the headnote to World Literature Today<\/em>’s Endangered Literatures issue, which sought to extend the defense of endangered languages by emphasizing the quality and diversity of their respective literatures. In short: the death of a language means the death of a literature, whether its skeleton is preserved (and rearranged) in the literary ossuaries of the academy or forgotten wholesale. <\/p>\n

I began translating Isthmus Zapotec poet V\u00edctor Ter\u00e1n in early 2008, from an anthology of contemporary indigenous poets I picked up on one of my many trips through Oaxaca, where I had spent time in several Zapotec communities. That translation project resulted in a remarkable friendship, first stoked over mezcal-boiled plums in Oaxaca City and further strengthened by a three-week tour of the UK in 2010. Over the course of our relationship I found myself increasingly inspired\u2014not just by V\u00edctor’s poems, which often combine an erotic pastoralism with a sonic delight I aspired and struggled to replicate in my English-language translations, but by his activism, his vision to strengthen the Zapotec language and culture by the act of writing poetry. <\/p>\n

His approach to the issue is pragmatic\u2014he has little influence on the political and economic hegemony of Spanish in Mexico, and he can\u2019t dictate educational policy. But he can\u2014and does\u2014inspire Zapotec speakers, especially young ones, to value their literary heritage. Cultural pride is the primary reason that Zapotec parents continue to raise their kids in Zapotec, maintaining its lifeblood.<\/p>\n

V\u00edctor and his contemporaries\u2014fellow poets Natalia Toledo and Irma Pineda as well as artists like Demian Flores and Soid Pastrana\u2014have inspired me to make a movie about their work, their literary activism. I\u2019m working with award-winning filmmaker Ben Rodkin, a close friend and regular collaborator whose films resonate with their own visual poetry. We need your support. Please visit our Kickstarter campaign<\/a> to read the details of what we\u2019re planning, which includes the publication of poetry from five indigenous Mexican languages. I hope you\u2019ll give if you can\u2014any amount makes a difference. And I hope you\u2019ll tell others about what V\u00edctor is doing, and how we hope to document it.<\/p>\n

David Shook is a poet and translator in Los Angeles. Recent translation projects include Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u2019s 1976 manifesto “Leave Everything, Again” (forthcoming in the Picador edition of<\/i> The Savage Detectives), Mario Bellatin\u2019s<\/i> Shiki Nagaoka, and<\/i> Kilometer Zero, an illicitly filmed documentary about tortured Equato-Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang.<\/i><\/p>\n