Discomfort as Guiding Element: An Interview with Elisa Taber

In late 2021, Ugly Duckling Presse, where I am an editor, will publish a trilingual edition (in Guaraní, Spanish, and English) of a chapbook by the contemporary Paraguayan poet Miguelángel Meza called Ita ha’eñoso / Ya no está sola la piedra formerly and again known as Pyambu / Dream Pattering Soles, as part of the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry. Meza’s book references Mbyá Guaraní myths as it blends the cosmos and the everyday and blurs the “boundaries” between deities, the human and the non-human.

The process of editing the book with my colleague Jen Hofer, and my interest in exploring my mother’s Paraguayan roots, led me to want to interview Meza’s translator, Elisa Taber. We communicated via email and voice messaging, Elisa from Buenos Aires, which is my hometown, I from New York, where I currently reside. Our emails were all in English, a second language for both of us, while our oral exchange was conducted in Spanish, our shared mother tongue, which set an intimate tone.

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Silvina López Medin: In the introduction to a selection of contemporary Guaraní poetry that you put together, you write, “I sought lyric texts that made me uncertain. Discomfort and incoherence are signs of different ways of poeticizing or narrativizing the world.”[1] You turn features that might turn others away into your guiding elements. Why did you choose to translate Miguelángel Meza’s book?

Elisa Taber: Dream Pattering Soles by Miguelángel Meza is a contemporary counterpart to the Ayvu Rapyta (The Origin of Human Language), a collection of sacred Mbyá Guaraní myths transcribed, translated, and collected by the anthropologist León Cadogan.

I seek writing that explores the potential of language to break down. Translated myths include transformation both in content—characters inhabit different bodies—and in form—languages alter each other. This morphing literature includes Meza’s poetry, written in Guaraní and self-translated into Spanish. It attunes readers to other ways of being and beings in the world, and makes them question what is linguistically and canonically legitimate.

In the context of world literature, the target culture judges the value and ethics of the source text. If the source demands to be understood on its own terms, it becomes partially untranslatable and thus, unread. Peripherical writers refuse centrally imposed mastery by inverting value judgements and clinging to orality, other languages, and different genres or disciplines. What is deemed illegible makes audible other dimensions of the world and words, as well as the hierarchies that deafen us to them, and it is only inaudible if it is cruel.

SLM: While reading the book, I had this feeling of a powerful perception, one in which human beings are not the main characters, but play secondary roles in relation to nature. The book description says: “The counterintuitive way that Meza renders the individual out of the communal is reminiscent of the Paraguayan embroidery technique, ñandutí, which means spider’s web.” Could you expand on this?

ET: Since the 1980s, the last decade of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (1954-1989), Meza has been writing fiction and poetry in Guaraní that depicts the contemporary Paraguayan reality, while referencing the ancient mythology and the indigenous struggle for land and human rights linked to that language. Ñandutí, like the language that gives this lace its name, is in many ways colonial, Spanish. However, indigenous myths are embedded both in Guaraní words and in ñandutí unstitches, whose technique involves extracting threads from fabric.

The central figures of speech in Dream Pattering Soles are metaphors and metonymies used in conjunction. Something substitutes another which is part of a whole. The attribute of a particular god is identifiable in a human and that of any human is identifiable in an animal or a thing. The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro claims that “Animism, interpreted as human sociality projected onto the non-human world, would be nothing but the metaphor of a metonymy.” In Dream Pattering Soles metaphors for metonymies topple the nature / culture / supernature triad and are replaced by literality. Animals are human and everything is sacred, immortal, cyclical. Paraphrasing the researcher Gloria E. Chacón, the cosmos and the everyday are symbiotic. Meza creates a lyric flow between the ancient and the new word by conversing with the Ayvu Rapyta.

SLM: You have pointed to a “blurring of clarity” in relation to the Guaraní ontology and how it’s embodied through language. Could you talk about this and the challenges it posed to your translation process?

ET: The titles of this chapbook—Pyambu / Dream Pattering Soles and Ita ha’eñoso / Ya no está sola la piedra (The Stone Is No Longer Alone)—are metaphors for attunement to other ways of being and beings in the world. The oneiric auditory image (Dream Pattering Soles) makes you aware of a single menacing presence, a deity turned human. The affective visual image (The Stone Is No Longer Alone) makes you aware of multiple comforting presences, the humanity of the nonhuman, including a mineral.

The first poem, “Appear / Aparezco / Apu,” renders and blurs the difference between the origin of the lyric voice and the world. Given that “Ñe’ẽ” means both word and soul in Guaraní, the birth of the poet provokes the awakening of the ancestral ontology and epistemology embedded in the language he writes in. Likewise, the apparition of deities is coupled with the anthropomorphizing of animals and things throughout the chapbook.

The writer and researcher Mario Castells claims, “many words in avañe’e [Guaraní] are micro-units of myths, ancient bridges that link Paraguayan society to their Guaraní ancestors.” In my translation, italics mark these micro-units of myth as literarily untranslatable Guaraní terms, I did not seek their English-language equivalents but instead expounded their literal and cultural translations in footnotes.

SLM: Can you describe your translation process, working between these three languages?

ET: I close read and compared the Guaraní and Spanish versions, translated from both languages into English, queried the author, and edited my version.

The slashes between the titles in Guaraní and their Spanish or English translations represent both resemblances and differences between the versions. Variation due to the limitations of the corresponding vocabulary and rules of syntax. Similarity in the sense that the Spanish and English are in sequence, the latter could not exist without the first, the bridge.

The versions also relate circularly. The English differs from the Spanish because it accesses the Guaraní directly and alters the original. Revisiting the bilingual edition, Ita ha’eñoso / Ya no está sola la piedra (Asunción: Alcándara Editora, 1985), thirty-six years after publication, led the author to edit the Guaraní version for this forthcoming trilingual edition.[2]

SLM: How does your own background connect to Paraguay and its multiple languages?

ET: I was conceived in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco in 1990, and conducted accidental fieldwork there in 2013 and 2016. An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country (11:11 Press, 2020) is my lyric ethnography about Neuland, a Mennonite colony in the Boquerón Department, and Cayim ô Clim, the neighboring Nivaklé settlement.

El gateo de los nuestros (The Crawling of Our Own), a collection of sacred Nivaklé myths transcribed, translated, and collected by the anthropologist Miguel Chase Sardi, led me to study Nivaklé, a Matacoan language. Then, the Ayvu Rapyta led me to study Guaraní.

SLM: Do you see these perceptions—uncertainty, discomfort—as barriers for more poetry in Indigenous and multiple languages being published?

ET: Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno (Nightboat Books, 2017) is an example of a book that transcends that barrier. It inverts value judgments by rendering discomfort and incoherence defiantly intentional. Bueno writes in Portunhol Selvagem—a macaronic language that combines Spanish, Portuguese, and Guaraní—which is masterful in its disavowal of mastery, as it applies the rules of one language to another. Erín Moure carries Bueno’s border-defying prose further in her translation into English, French, and Guaraní. Perhaps the challenge to literature in translation is best posed by the writer-translator that defies national as well as linguistic borders.