random-thought-depository:worriedaboutmyfern:ecc-poetry: “Tenochtitlan,” by Elisa Chavez

random-thought-depository:worriedaboutmyfern:ecc-poetry: “Tenochtitlan,” by Elisa Chavez. Cortes’ men thought the Mexica’sfloating city must be a dream:stone temples jutting from the water,voracious bright gardensand grand estates. My sun-worshipping ancestorskept their gods close,heeded their rapt whispers.In their names, they built marvelouscanals and walked on the waters. It shouldn’t then surprisethat artists have tried to recaptureTenochtitlan, brooding on the dreamjournals of Spaniards: they imagine herbright causeways, the lush gardenspaving her streets like enchantments. The Spanish, steely god-mongersthat they were, knew wellhow to deal with enchantment:They burned Tenochtitlan to ash. Leí que los Mexica ahogaban a mujeresde cercanos pueblos para apaciguara la diosa de las lluvias.Su templo mayor tenía dosestantes de cráneos. Mis antepasados que adoraban al solmantenían a sus dioses cerca,escuchando a sus voces rapaces.En sus nombres, perpetrabanmaravillas y atrocidades. No debe sorprender entoncesque los pueblos a fuera de Tenochtitlanles daron la bienvenida a cualquieraque prometiera un final al sol cruel,las flores mentirosas, los aguaspavimentados con los huesos de tributas. El dios de los Hispanos fue el oro,y él les mandó a quemar Tenochtitlan,enviándola para reunirse conlas doncellas ahogadas. Is this translation inaccurate? You bet! Miss Translated is a meditation on culture, identity, and the things that get lost in translation by Elisa Chavez. To support this project, check out my Patreon. What you’ve read above is a lie. That is, the poems were real; but the translations don’t accurately reflect each other. This is always the case with Elisa Chavez’s “Miss Translated” poems and it’s why I believe she’s one of the most exciting modern poets working today.Because what she does is honestly extraordinary. I have no idea which one comes first or what her process is. But what she shares with the world is a poem, in English, side by side with a translation in Spanish. Only the Spanish is wrong. Or, well, the Spanish is right; the English is wrong. It’s a real poem all right, and often a more powerful one than its English counterpart. But it doesn’t say what the English says. She does not supply a “correct” translation. For that she relies on her readers. Elisa Chavez says of her project that: “The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.“The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.”My own great-grandmother was born and raised in Mexico. My grandmother was raised bilingual and my mother is far more fluent in Spanish than she cares to admit (she says she “doesn’t speak it,” but the one time someone really tried to cheat us and retreated into “no hablo ingles,” she was a FOUNTAIN of español). I was the first on my matrilineal side to be raised monolingual, in English. I love these poems because the process I go through, of reading the English first, then the Spanish and guessing at it, and then looking up a proper translation, feels revelatory.Anyway, all that is lead up. The payoff is, I couldn’t find an “accurate” translation of the Spanish in this poem already online, so I asked my mom friend Francisca Cázares ( you can follow her at https://www.facebook.com/francisca.cazares or https://www.instagram.com/xicana_en_oaklandia/) for the true translation, and she gave me this:I read that the Mexica drowned womenfrom nearby towns to appeasethe goddess of rain.Her temple had twoshelves of skulls.My ancestors who adored the sunkept their gods closelistening to their rapacious voices.In their names they perpetrated miracles and atrocities.It shouldn’t then surprisethat the towns outside Tenochtitlángave welcome to anyonewho promised an end to the cruel sunthe lying flowers, the waterspaved with bones of tributesThe Spanish god was goldand ordered them to burn Tenochtitlánsending her to reunite withthe drowned maids To be honest this poem is challenging to me personally. As I said to a friend, “feels like Chavez’s point with this poem is something close to ‘don’t fucking romanticize human sacrifice, asswads’…Which, yes, but there’s so many more pressing issues…? I stand by loving what she does with making the act of translation part of her poetry, though.” And then I went back and re-read some of the Chavez poem-and-translation sets that I think are raw genius incarnate, like “La sirena y pescador / The mermaid and the fisherman” or “El vampiro / ICE.” So then I thought, well, all of Elisa Chavez’s other fans deserve to be challenged by “Tenochtitlan” as I have been challenged, probably. Or maybe I just want to talk about this with people who will understand, and sharing the translation contributes to understanding?In any case I asked Francisca if I could share it with credit and she said yes, so here you are. She honestly did a beautiful job with the translation so if you go onto her social media for fuck’s sake be nice. The one thing I love about the implied criticism of the Mexica in this poem is that outsiders can’t actually read it. So I am the traitor breaching the language gates, please don’t make me regret it. “As I said to a friend, “feels like Chavez’s point with this poem is something close to ‘don’t fucking romanticize human sacrifice, asswads’…Which, yes, but there’s so many more pressing issues…?”Or maybe “don’t romanticize tyranny and imperialism just cause PoC are doing it,” which is more relevant to today’s world.And I think maybe I can see some of what the author was trying to do:The English version implicitly encourages you to view Tenochtitlan from the perspective of an outsider: a Spanish Conquistador seeing it for the first time, or a twenty-first century person imagining it and thinking about their relationship to it. The implicit portrayal of the Aztecs is sympathetic, but in a way that centers the perspectives of people who are distant from them; Tenochtitlan appears as something fully formed, more-or-less self-contained, magnificent, beautiful, and maybe magical (the way it might appear to a visitor), and then it gets destroyed. “Tenochtitlan was impressive and then the Spanish destroyed it” is basically how the city gets remembered in history books written by people who are more culturally European than culturally native American. The poem draws the reader toward experiencing Tenochtitlan in something like the way the Conquistadors experienced it: it is magnificent and beautiful, and then it is destroyed. It is mourned, in very much the way we might mourn a lost painting by some Renaissance master or a lost work of Shakespeare.I can’t read Spanish, but based on your friend’s translation… The Spanish version situates the Conquistadors as late arrivals in a longer history with tragedies, conflicts, and tensions that had nothing to do with them. The Spanish version encourages you to view Tenochtitlan from the perspective of its neighbors; from the perspective of people who had to coexist with it when it was at the height of its power. It appears not as some self-contained tragically lost work of art, but as a living imperial capital, with the sort of relationship to its neighbors that implies (one defined by power and violence). The Spanish poem is less sympathetic to the Aztecs because it takes their world more seriously; foregrounds it instead of treating it as a fuzzy backdrop.A while back I made some posts about how the Spanish conquest of MesoAmerica looks to me kind of like … if imperialistic aliens invaded and conquered a Nazi victory timeline Earth, and centuries later (after the alien empire has been reformed into a more Star Trek Federation type society) the Nazi empire is one of the two or four pre-conquest human states the average person knows about and most people have no idea that Nazism was a new and radical political ideology at the time of the conquest and assume that they were racist genocidal eugenicists because their culture was just like that.Extending that analogy to these poems, the English version of this poem reads like a poem an alien or very culturally cosmopolitanized human might write lamenting the cool and awesome architecture that got destroyed when the aliens dropped a 20 megaton orbit-to-surface fusion-warhead missile on the Welthauptstadt Germania during the opening hours of the invasion, while the Spanish version of this poem reads like something an eastern European with Slavic and Jewish ancestry who knows their history might write in that world. -- source link

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