This is Not a Metaphor

Sounds and resonances are liquid: they can be poured like wine, they can flood the soul, they can cross borders uncontained and unpoliced. As I drive between Tijuana and San Diego with the radio on, the stations flicker between languages: it is not possible to tell, by the frequencies picked up, which country I am in. Dreams from either side of the wall spill over and are translated into each other’s languages, with many slippages in meaning, as the Pacific Ocean raves on, unconcerned, speaking a “language where language ends," as Rilke might say. But where does the line between the worlds reside exactly? Is it the geometrical line that can be traced along the border wall, or rather, is Mexico itself the border, the buffer zone, the bridge between?  In his book Movements in Chicano Poetry, Rafael Pérez-Torres writes that “the poet becomes a border crosser, but of a particular type: a coyote, a smuggler, moving people and goods back and forth across aesthetic and cultural as well as geopolitical borders.” The translator plays a similar role, moving between different worlds, generating both fascination and mistrust.

The Spanish of the borderlands is a particular kind of hybrid language. English seeps in through the seams, commandeering gerunds, overpowering syntax, abounding in false friends, and contaminating traditional forms of speech. I use the word “contaminating” unabashedly, as I scan the news for literal translations and wrack my brains for a more natural (or old fashioned?) economy of language in Spanish. To say “I can’t understand” in Spanish, should I say “no puedo entender”? Isn’t “no entiendo” sufficient, and therefore better? It’s easy to lose my way, having migrated out of Mexico nearly a decade and a half ago, leaving Spanish back home where it continues to evolve without me. I can’t help but experience these things as minute linguistic injustices that add up to the erosion of a whole culture, and so, when translating into English, I want to be able to get away with Spanishifying the syntax without being called a bad translator. How much am I able to smuggle into English, which has historically been so porous?

Of course, these preoccupations do nothing to balance out the weight of the American dream, its syntactical pull, invisible and taken for granted, which gets mixed in with the air we breathe and calcifies in our insides over time. Spanish is being molded to English at a faster pace than English will ever be molded to Spanish. The relationship between the two is not equal. But do I even want to defend Spanish against the English language, as if Spanish weren’t itself a dominant language, with its own history of colonialism and its role in decimating indigenous cultures? Or am I trying to resist something bigger, like the language of capitalism?

 

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Our climate emergency demands that we find other ways to relate to the natural world. In order to change our way of life, we need to build alternative mindsets and narratives. For several years I have felt called to transition away from the extractivist mindset that was a pillar of my education, and translating from minority languages seems like a way forward. When we translate, we translate not only the words, but the whole poem. And then again, not only the whole poem, but we reach also for translating something of the worldview that made the poem possible. The problem is that we don’t realize how deeply embedded the capitalist ideology is: even the phrase ‘a way forward’ does not fit with the circular concept of time common to many indigenous cultures. To say ‘a way forward’ implies that we believe our path to be about linear progress from worse to better: a narrative trap of self-improvement we so often fall into, and which is the main hook for much marketing and consumerism. To say ‘relating to the natural world­’—that little preposition—makes it seem as if the natural world were external to us, which complicates the possibility of understanding that we are inextricably part of it. I need to find other languages within my own. This is one of the main things that drives me to translate.

In her book, Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz calls into question the possibilities of translation when the language we are moving into comes with its own cultural preconceptions. She writes: “How can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?” The question seems deceptively simple. We all know that life cannot exist without water and that our bodies are made of water. We also readily accept that, from a scientific point of view, a river is an ecosystem that is alive. But the Mojave thinking goes further, and this is where both the translator and the reader are required to make the leap: "I carry a river. It is who I am: 'Aha Makav. This is not a metaphor." As Diaz explains:

Translated into English, ‘Aha Makav means the river runs through
the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land.

This is a poor translation, like all translations.

In American imaginations, the logic of this image will lend itself to surrealism or magical realism—

Indeed, the artistic and literary movements of surrealism and magical realism often appropriated images from indigenous cultures and used them as selling points, to huge success. It is easy to imagine a René Magritte painting of a woman made out of a river, or the quirky book cover to some novel entitled “The Girl Who Carried A River Everywhere She Went.” Understanding the image outside and away from these frameworks requires that we build our understanding from the ground up, using a different kind of logic: “The Colorado River [...] is a part of my body,” writes Diaz. “This is not a metaphor.”

Consider these lines from a poem about family lineage in Tu’un Savi and Spanish by Oaxacan poet Nadia López García, in which the speaker asks his mother why she cries:

And she would reply, just like that, still crying:
because we carry rivers inside us
and sometimes they burst out. Your rivers haven’t risen yet
but they will soon.

Taking in these lines fully, in order to translate them, requires not only that we move away from the temptation of the idiomatic English phrase “to cry a river,” with all its sarcastic overtones and pop culture references. It also requires that we move away from our habit of reading the image as a metaphor that is already familiar. (A river of tears = An abundance of tears. The End). When we read more literally, and consider our rivers to be a part of our own body, we can start to understand the very real—not just symbolic—need to protect them. We move from the overwhelm of isolated, individual heartache to something wholly shared with nature and community, and the shape of our grief is transformed.