The art of failure in translating a Navajo poem

Abstract

The art of failure in translating a Navajo poem L'art de l'échec dans la traduction d'un poème navajo El arte de fallar traduciendo un poema navajo

“A Line Will Take Us Hours Maybe:”Craft and Inspiration from the Ethnography of Poetry

“…Discerning which is which is not so easily done from any vantage point. here is, then, not just an ambiguity within Jim's poems (see Webster, 2015Webster, , 2016Webster, , 2017, but there is also an ambiguity that surrounds the authorship of the poems. Here it is useful to mention that Jim (1995) oten publishes his poetry using his Navajo name Mazii Dinéłtsoi and not his English-language name Rex Lee Jim.…”

“…I don't claim to clarify all or even most of what Jim told me, but I hope enough to make my interpretations below sensible. I have also discussed portions of this transcript in more detail elsewhere (Webster, 2016). I will present a conversation with the Navajo poet Blackhorse Mitchell with a similar format.…”

“…In an interview, not the one transcribed here, Jim told me that the choice of English or Navajo depended on the language of the poem; that is, poems that needed to be expressed primarily in Navajo were written primarily in Navajo and poems that needed to be expressed primarily in English were written primarily in English. Form and content were here intertwined (see Webster, 2004Webster, , 2016.…”

“…I have discussed some of these issues elsewhere (Webster, 2016) and, so, here will focus on the question of where poetry comes from. To simplify here a bit, for Jim there appear to be three ways that he creates poetry: 1) he works and reworks a poem, oten through "rigorous thinking" or "inspiration" from "conversations, experiences, and realities" (we can call this the crat of poetry); 2) he creates poetry based on what he hears others say (call this, if you like, found poetry in the words of others); and 3) they come to him by way of Little Wind (níłch'i 'áłts'íísí) and resist reworking (call this, then, "inspired speech" from a nonhuman agent).…”

“…As Gary Witherspoon (1977: 60) suggests, "to the Navajo, sound is air in motion, and speech is highly reined and patterned air in motion." And some of them like náhookǫs ndi náhookǫs or ni eiya yaah ni they come in the middle of the night and you get up and write them down and the next day you try to improve on it so you write several pages that doesn't work you try to add or delete something and it doesn't work they just come and they are considered masterpieces you can't do anything to it I've tried and it doesn't work and in many ways I feel that it's not my work because they just appear out of nowhere and sometimes I think about what Navajos say about the Little Wind telling you something [wind in background] ater so much experience and so much trials and errors that somehow your human mind is ready to receive something from somewhere else or maybe has already been there but you were just too egotistical or full of it that you never allowed it to sink in [laughter] I don't know how it works all I know is it feels like somebody is telling you to write it and so some of them come like that and so some of the poems like that Elsewhere, I have translated and discussed the náhookǫs 'north, to revolve, the Big Dipper' poem (Webster, 2016). Jim (2010) has translated and discussed both the poems he recited that night as well.…”