Poetry as a Vessel: Preserving Navajo Culture Amidst the Dangers of Translation

For a poem I was writing, I wanted to reimagine the word for eyebrow in Diné bizaad to detail my grandfather’s life as a uranium miner, so I approached my parents with an invitation of communal translation. The bridge between English and Diné bizaad can mean numerous things to different Diné communities. For example, my father’s description of the eyebrow was round and robust, about the eye, like the jaggedness of Dennehotso terrain. My mother’s was sharp and undeviating, addressing the hair, like the trees that cover the mountains in Sweetwater. As I placed tension on my parents, my father formed a relationship to his translation, a commitment to an image he was producing. My mother, on the other hand, became unresponsive to the invitation of communal translation. Asking Navajo speakers to come together to document language can become a challenge. I find thinking and doing in community has become our tribe’s most slippery slope, forcing the discourse to be less about the language and more about the argument of a language. Translation can often devalue a speaker’s experiences. A documentarian is asking the language to bend to the will of another. Is that not an act of colonizing? So, as I set forth a relationship with Diné bizaad, poetry became a new technology for touch, to explore the dangerous for a better understanding of K’é. 

First, we have to understand that the study of a language changes with time. This is something I think learners and writers of Diné bizaad resist. A language has to adapt, borrow, and have room for mobility. Current speakers are caught in between, uncertain at times about usage. If I were to give someone a poem from a place of sincerity, who is to say if that poem’s sincerity will change toward misrepresentation tomorrow? This was true of my work with my own community when I would reintroduce the same poem on different days, in different settings. This is the complexity of Diné bizaad, putting the Diné poet in a constant state of tension with their language, but what if we place this tension elsewhere in our language? For myself, this is sound and image. If I can borrow, flex, and play with the semantic properties of Diné bizaad, or the Navajo language, through prosody and mental representations, I’m giving it a chance to have mobility, a flexibility to mean something different every time. However, this also challenges the thought-to-language relationship that has been treated as an exclusive mode of scholarship in the Diné writing community. Diné Thought, or Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozho, is not an exclusive cognition. It is a practice of philosophy and language work that English poets, thinkers, writers, and especially speakers are not cognizant of. For example, Nitsáhákees, meaning Thinking, can be a way to debate and challenge in order to create new ways of approaching difficult topics. This being the first step in Diné thought is what scholarly research—including reading poetry and other works of literature to analyze form and structure—can do for English writers and poets. Thus, the poet or speaker can then formulate a plan of attack, or begin the process of writing—to perform Nahat’á.

Nevertheless, thinking is not an exclusive act. It is not that English speakers can’t think the same way as the Diné do, it is that we communicate and write differently. We can learn how philosophy, politics, and history are working alongside and against Diné bizaad through poetry. This is where the space of translation can be dangerous for learners and those working in Diné literature and poetry. Feelings such as grief, love, and longing are entirely universal. However, we find more work oppressing our languages on the page by affixing it to one meaning. As Arthur Sze wrote in his essay “On Translation,” translation is an impossible act. Within that impossibility is the precise experience of a poem. The caesura, as an example, serves as a tension holder in English writing for many Diné poets, myself included, so why are we not practicing this when we use Diné bizaad on the page? Syntax almost immediately becomes an exclusive act of knowledge for readers of poetry. For instance, in the opening line to the poem I was writing, I used the following: 

bi’náá’łizhinii    diłhił    na’ashjé’ii ...

These caesuras give brevity to the words. Bi, meaning his, hers, or theirs, and náá’ meaning eyes or looking, coupled with łizhinii, indicates their black eyes or their eyes are black for a straightforward translation. However, we have diłhił, which means jet black. This would translate to:

Their eyes are black     jet black ...

This feels right, but what sort of tension are we holding here? There is a sense of what Sze calls the radical. In Diné bizaad, the letter Ł gives order to the chaos of characters. We understand this Ł sound is in relation to color for this poem. In a traditional sense, we would add the equivalent words for are or is between bi’náá’łizhinii and diłhił, making it:

Their eyes, black     are     jet black ...

But because tensions matter in the culmination of grief and wonder for my grandfather, I wanted the poem to work in layers rather than handing over the image to the reader. As a translator and a poet, I’m playing with sound to indicate I’m referring to Diné eyes, wide and open with the blackness coming in like spiders, this being na’ashjé’ii. With those sounds and images, I ask myself, can a reader understand my grief a bit more?

I tackle these semantics on the page for this reason: to give learning speakers the tools for Nitsáhákees. However, we do have issues when the poet works toward a reimagining. Speakers with Diné bizaad as their heritage language often see the language on the page and resist the concreteness of it, concreteness being ink to paper. When the speaker and poet are in conversation, there must be a tacit agreement in place to allow the freedom to challenge but also the freedom to explore. Diné bizaad is largely working with the movement of otherness, or the denominalization of reality; in English terminology, this is the passive voice. However, this way of speech is actually what makes nihízaad, our voice and language, complex and poetic. Verbalizing nouns decenters the human experience and this is the thought process we deem as Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozho, a physiocracy of sorts, although one deeply ingrained in a non-hierarchical way of living. 

Returning to the opening line of my poem, we can reference the final word: na’ashjé’ii. This can mean spider. In English, in order for the noun to exist at the end of a sentence, something else has to be doing something to it. In Diné bizaad, we mean to use na’ashjé’ii as a verb. In translation, it is almost certain the translator will adverbalize it to spiderly, making the line:

Their black eyes     are     jet black     spiderly ...

What is not working here is the relationship between the multitude of verbs occurring all at once. In Diné bizaad, verbs are the identifiers. Once we understand the Ł sound, we end the line with na’ashjé’ii which contains ii, a nominalizer. In a traditional sense, there are morphemes missing in the word like tsoh at the end of na’ashjé’ii to indicate the bigness of the insect. Some may also argue it means black widow spider, but here, that does not add to the image. By adding tsoh, we also create a dull, heavy sound at the end of the sentence:

bi’náá’łizhinii  diłhił  na’ashjéiitsoh

I believe this is where the argument between the poet and the speaker stems from. Why are we breaking the knowledge of Diné bizaad, which we only know in fractions, instead of creating new knowledges? I’ve been in conversation with Dr. Shaina A. Nez about this question. The morphology of Trans-, meaning beyond, linked with Brevity has two definitions, coined by Dr. Nez: the shortness in time and the conciseness of words and speech. We have been calling it Transbrevity, or beyond the exacting of words, speech, and moments in time. We understand as poets that form and content is a marriage that supports the language of a poem. Like the concept of K’é, we have to root our poetry in the values of something. Why can’t this be kinship or community? Yet, we must also remind ourselves, as poets and speakers, like linguists, that language documentation is not concrete. No dictionary or commentary on a language is final or should be constitutional. As with kin and community, it must keep moving in order to survive. This vibration of language work in poetry can ripple and reach for Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozho. Shaping and reshaping language on the page places pressure on the colonized worldview. Instead of asking “what does it mean,” maybe we ask “how does it mean?” This, for me, is Transbrevity.

Asking my mother what my poem meant to her gave her authority and something tangible that neither my father or I could reach. My poem stood for new meanings and a new lexicon for eyebrow—a new way of talking about my late grandfather. It isn’t the final product of a poem I’m interested in, but the way poetry can bring community together in a way that gives language to something we have a hard time touching. When we perform translation against or alongside the concept of Transbrevity, we give autonomy to Diné bizaad. An eyebrow stands still in the valleys of English, but in my heritage tongue it represents the mobility and complexities of those who gave me my language.