I will start with a short poem composed some 600 years ago by Nezahualcoyotl, one of the last rulers of the kingdom of Texcoco, in Ancient Mexico:

As far as we can judge from the very few examples that survived the Spanish Conquest, such as this poem, literature flourished in the region during that period. The language in which it was composed, Classical Náhuatl, also called Mexican, or more rarely Aztec, is just one of many belonging to the so-called Uto-Aztec linguistic family, which, in turn, is just one of dozens of linguistic families native to a huge continent that stretches almost from pole to pole. This diversity encompasses, of course, many different traits and sociolinguistic situations, but all the indigenous languages of the Americas, as diverse as they may be, share several general characteristics of a very distinct nature: first, from a structural point of view they are strikingly different from Indo-European (or even from Old World Languages in general); second, they are relegated to minority status in almost all the countries where they are spoken; and last, but not least, they are undeniably either “rural-constrained,” or, even since the sixteenth century, “hegemonized languages,” that is, communication codes that were expelled from and deprived of complex urban environments―wherever this was once the case―or steadily kept apart from them. This means, among other things, that for the last 500 years they have been almost completely absent from the world of higher education, modern science and technology, as well as from the spheres of higher political power. All this accounts for the special difficulties a translator faces when working with, for example, Cree, spoken from eastern to western Canada, or Yaqui, spoken in the Mexican state of Sonora.

Indigenous languages may contain a bewildering abundance of terms regarding their geographical habitat or the social structures of the communities in which they are spoken, but they usually lack equivalents for most of the terms used in other languages when describing almost anything pertaining to a modern environment. An English sentence as simple as “When I heard a ring, I went to the desk and answered the phone” can be frustratingly difficult to translate into Tarahumara, because this language has always been used in an environment where there is no ring, no desk and no phone. Furthermore, the fact that there were, until recently, no linguistic authorities within indigenous communities, such as a school system based on the use of aboriginal languages, or an official academy regulating aspects such as orthography or grammatical and lexical variation, has kept alive the natural dialectal diversity, so important from many points of view, but nevertheless an obstacle for the development of written literature.

Literary writing and literary translation into the aboriginal languages of the Americas are certainly not new phenomena. They thrived even up to the sixteenth century, when cathechisms, biblical texts, laws and even theological and scientific treatises were written in Classical and Colonial Náhuatl. Virgil’s Eclogue IV, for instance, is available in Náhuatl. The consolidation of Spanish rule by the end of the seventeenth century nearly put an end to that activity. But the renaissance of aboriginal languages as literary media of expression―setting aside the fascinating subject of traditional oral literatures―is indeed a novelty in the recent panorama of Latin-American culture. Indigenous creative writing began during the 1980s (in some cases somewhat earlier), but in only three decades has produced several interesting writers and oeuvres. We cannot be sure, of course, what the long-term outcome of this literary movement will be, but if we want this fascinating process to consolidate and serve as a strategy for preserving our cultural diversity, literary translation into the indigenous languages will certainly have to play an important role.

Given the difficulties, some questions arise. Is a modern French novel translatable into the Yaqui language? Definitely. But not without making abundant use of strategies and resources generally avoided by the standard translator—footnoting, word-loaning, loan-translation, circumloquia, adaptation and plain omission, for example—and risking having the traditional autochthonous readership understand little, or, in the best of cases, only part of the translation. Another question: Is the role of the translator when translating from and to “modern” (or non-hegemonized languages) the same as when translating from French into Yaqui? Definitely not, because in the former case the translator works with culturally interconnected codes and within a well-established tradition, whereas in the latter he or she often faces a real cultural chasm and operates as an intermediary and as one of the inventors of a written literary tradition. The pressure caused by these circumstances often invites and even forces him or her to perform acts of social intervention, thus transcending the mere function of what we call translation. In other words, any such enterprise may well be an exercise of cultural adaptation and language alteration.

All literary languages differ from spoken forms, which are nothing but an ever-changing continuum of interconnected codes that vary not only according to region, but also to social class, age group and even individuals. When writers develop or accept a “standard variety,” what they are doing is trying to freeze a language form, both in space (geographically) and in time (diachronically), so that it can become a common ground for a whole community for at least one period of history. We all know that this frozen language block is not really a “block” and is not really “frozen”; we know that it needs impurities and is always cracking and melting away, until eventually it is abandoned and replaced by a newer form. The history of Latin is a good example of this. But in the mid-term, a literary standard has become a successful means to develop and maintain a whole literature. The problem with most minority and hegemonized languages is that they have no such literary form, and whatever a translator or indigenous writer produces is contributing, whether intentionally or not, to the creation of that standard. In other words, both the indigenous writer and, especially, the literary translator into indigenous languages act as language planners, sometimes starting out by establishing an orthography, but more often than not choosing between different dialect forms, giving new meaning to old words and expressions, accepting or rejecting loans or calques, and even creating new words.

Two of the most troublesome questions in this process are plain adaptation and vocabulary expansion. Natural languages are, as we all know, assymetrical among themselves, and the further they are separated from the philogenetic and cultural points of view, the more assymetrical they can be. When we compare the vocabulary of a language such as Tarahumara with that of a well-established literary language, the lack of clear-cut correspondences can eventually lead to the one-way solution of adaptation. Japanese distinguishes between “whirlpools” and “whirlwinds,” just as English and Spanish do. But Tarahumara, spoken in a geographic area where “whirlpools” are unheard of, has only one term, equivalent to “whirlwind.” Upon translating Ono no Komachi’s famous tanka poem in which the poet compares herself to a floating lotus and complains about her solitude, wishing to follow a whirlpool, the Tarahumara poet Dolores Batista faced a problem: in the Tarahumara sierras there are no lotuses and no whirlpools, and therefore no words for them. Adding notes or newly-coined words would only add artificiality into a very short poem and thus neutralize it as a poem, so that was not an option. The only way out was an adaptation. The final result, retranslated into English, reads more or less as follows: “Always alone/ wind carries me away like a fallen flower. / Sad and alone./ Oh, would I follow the whirlwind/ if only it would invite me.” The translation, she thought, works on its own. But is it really a translation, or does it fall into the hybrid “variation” category?

Coining new words in order to fill lexical assymetries has been a widely used strategy among both translators and writers but has proven dangerous, and has frequently damaged more than helped the promotion of new indigenous written literature. Among average speakers of an Amerindian language, and given the fact that most of the adult indigenous population is now bilingual, whenever a subject is felt to be too difficult to be expressed in the native tongue, the speaker will typically use Spanish, English, Portuguese or French, depending on circumstance, indulging in a to-and-fro dynamic between one language and another. Linguists call this phenomenon code switching . But code switching is also dangerous because it often sends the wrong signal to the younger generation, suggesting obsolescence of the native tongue. This, as well as the rejection of the hegemonic national language, has created a purist reaction among native writers and translators, who tend to fill lexical gaps from the source text to the translation with artificially constructed neologisms. By far the most widely used technique for creating these neologisms has been description by juxtaposition of roots, whenever languages allow this. Thus, a “pick-up” has become “toame” in the Tarahumara language (according to one such proposal), which literally means “carrier.” But because no description is ever sufficient (a “carrier” could also be a wheelbarrow or a suitcase), the resulting texts too often turn out to be cryptic and difficult to read. My recommendation would be to accept loans whenever they are in common use, and introduce neologisms only when they are easy to understand and leave little room for ambiguity.

During the last five decades or so, economic, social and intellectual trends have deeply eroded the old, emotional loyalties toward ideas (and ideals) such as “people” or “nation,” so prevalent during the Romantic and even Modern eras, so the question nowadays is not why a writer should adopt one of the most widely spoken languages in the world as his or her tool of literary expression, but rather why any writer should cling to a language spoken only by tiny national minorities and within a very restricted geographical and social frame. Different answers can be given, ranging from emotional to rational, but the amazing fact is that literary production in these languages is a reality, and one that does not seem to be dwindling away or a passing trend for the time being.

When trying to emphasize the importance of preserving linguistic diversity, one must always remember, even if it sounds clichéd, that languages are not parallel systems of signs that “reflect” the world. Languages are, rather, independent―or at least largely independent―systems of interpretation of the world. And they are so because any set of words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) arbitrarily taxonomizes the world according to cultural synergies and values, as well as particular historical circumstances. Moreover, languages are living documents that encode much information about the communities that speak them, including historical facts not documented elsewhere. So whenever a language dies, mankind loses a real treasure chest of invaluable information and possibilities: one more reason to support the preservation and development of indigenous literatures.

I will end with yet another short poem, this one translated from Tarahumara and written a couple of years ago by a young Tarahumara writer and translator, Martin Makawi:

I believe the poem attests to the vigorous capacity of the indigenous languages of the Americas as vehicles of literary expression, bearing witness to both the particularities and the universals of human experience.

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