Canada

Abstract

Article academia, the Dene and Métis poet Tenille K. Campbell uses Dene in the main title, and the translation in the subtitle: nedi nezu (Good Medicine). Campbell encourages the listener to "mix in the words / from your nation". Louise Bernice Halfe, also known as Sky Dancer, released awâsis: kinky and dishevelled with the main title in Cree-though I am not certain about a translation in the subtitle in this case. Francine Merasty's debut, however, gives non-Cree speakers the translation after the slash: Iskotew Iskwew/Fire Woman: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl. The book reflects on the traumas elicited by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2017. A more publicly established multimodal artist, John McDonald released Kitotam: He Speaks to It, a title (also in Cree with an English translation) that highlights his work as a performance poet and beat poet (all in Poetry).In Indigenous memoirs, we see the trend in Darrel J. McLeod's Peyakow: Reclaiming Cree Dignity; Eli Baxter's Aki-wayn-zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth, with a title in Anishinaabaymowin; and Nicola I. Campbell's Spílexm: A Weaving of Recovery, Resilience, and Resurgence, with a title in NłeɁkepmxcín (all in Letters and Auto/ Biography). These Indigenous words speak to a confidence in the assertion of Indigenous languages in English contexts, to the co-existence of these languages even when English is known to be destructive as a weapon of colonialism, and more generally to the act of translation in any communication.Of course, other languages get the same treatment in a country as vast and diverse as Canada, all in poetry here. I have already mentioned Lillian Necatov's Italian-titled il virus. An example appears in Arabic too, Rayya Liebich's Min Hayati, which might be loosely translated as "from my life" or "from my dear," a book that meditates upon the author's mother's death. The loss of a maternal figure, but this time a grandmother, is also deeply felt in Adrian De Leon's Barangay: An Offshore Poem, which uses the Tagalog word for boat and for neighbourhood to grieve not only a person but also the lost ability to move linguistically between communities. Possibly drawing on Old Norse but more explicitly writing about human-nature relationships and bodily contaminations, Rebecca Salazar offers a kenning in sulphurtongue. (See also the kenning of Therese Estacion's Phantompains). Closer to English and its loan languages is a French title: Aaron Tucker's Catalogue d'oiseaux. Catherine Graham's AEther: An Out-of-Body Lyric invokes the Latin diphthong in a lyric essay in response to a cancer diagnosis (on schizophrenia as illness, see also ky perraun's Miraculous Sickness). In another Latinate title, George Murray offers us Problematica: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. And of course there is "simply" English-but a lesser-known example-from Megan Gail Coles, Satched, a word that means "soaked through" or "weighed down" in Newfoundland English and that, in this case, alludes to a sense of ecological despai...