Bilingual Poem Research Articles

Maize Landscapes in Indigenous Literatures: Toward Alternative Cartographic Imaginaries

Abstract The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a literary revival in the Indigenous languages of the region known canonically as “Latin America.” Across this varied corpus, a major theme is the cultural significance of maize. This article compares the depiction of maize in four bilingual poems, each written in a different Indigenous language alongside Spanish: Nahuatl (Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez), Yucatec Maya (María Dolores Dzul Barboza), Central Quechua (César Vargas Arce), and Southern Quechua (Emilio Corrales). Through close textual analysis and by recourse to theoretical perspectives such as “literary cartography,” the “textual continuum,” “deep mapping,” and “trans-indigeneity,” the article argues that each poem communicates culturally specific ways of understanding geography that, when set in dialogue, challenge hegemonic definitions of the Western Hemisphere such as North, South, or Latin “America.” Rather, the poems in combination weave an interconnected yet multiperspectival cartographic tapestry with maize as the common thread.

Dialects and Languages in the Poetic Oeuvre of Laurentius Rhodoman (1545–1606)

This paper analyzes the choice of languages and dialects in the poetic oeuvre of the German Protestant humanist Laurentius Rhodoman. The first section discusses an instance of Latin-Greek code-switching in the poem Iter Lipsicum, arguing that it is influenced by the common educational background of both author and addressee. The second section considers two of Rhodoman's poems written in the Greek Doric dialect and tries to explain the dialect choice by analyzing their context and intended audience. The third section examines some of his bilingual poems (both Latin-German and Greek-Latin prose), and the final section is dedicated to the handling of Greek and Latin verse in Rhodoman's bilingual poem Troica. The analysis proves that Rhodoman made a highly deliberate choice of languages and dialects. 

Born in Winter: A Conversation with Shizue Ogawa

Born in WinterA Conversation with Shizue Ogawa Alice-Catherine Carls (bio) and Shizue Ogawa (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution For Shizue Ogawa, creating is more important than publishing and selling, and yet her readership has been steadily growing in Japan and internationally. Her poetry paints the world with serenity and wonderment without hiding its underground turmoil. Born on the plains of Hokkaido's eastern Kasai District, she remains very close to nature. Her work promotes cultural understanding among nations; its themes and forms bridge the literary traditions of East and West. [End Page 58] Alice-Catherine Carls: Your poetry flows freely with a light step. When did you start writing poems, and when did you decide to publish your first book? Shizue Ogawa: I was about fifty years old when I published my first book. My philosophy professor in college was the first person to read my poems. Since then, he has told me many times, "Go out into the world with poetry." At first, I did not understand the meaning of what he was saying. Decades have passed since then. I was not conscious that I was writing poetry. Poems became part of life quite naturally. But I was writing. Some of my poems from that time remain. I was not interested in saving what I wrote. When I had a basket full of poems, I disposed of it without reading them again. One year the professor suffered a heart attack. At that time, he said, "I will not die until you publish a book of poems." I hurriedly began translating the poems I had into English. I should have made one book to give to the professor, but I decided to make three or four books, one for my parents and one for my home. I took the manuscript to a company that publishes private editions. When I asked the person in charge to make four books, he was surprised. He said, "Making four books costs the same as making three hundred books." I thought, "What am I going to do if I make three hundred books?" I did not even know that I would be donating books to libraries. After I learned to use computers, I became aware that what I write is not to be thrown away but to be preserved. My poems became a collection of Japanese-English bilingual poems because I was an English teacher. The poems were easy to write, but it took me a long time to complete the English translation. Carls: Can you give us examples of early poems' themes and purpose? How many did you write? Were they for a special occasion, or simply to express your feelings and thoughts at a particular time? Ogawa: When I started writing, I was not aware that I was writing poetry. Not even now. I don't have a clear memory of the theme, the purpose, how many books I wrote, or on what occasions I wrote them. I never thought of it as expressing my emotions and thoughts in writing. The oldest surviving poem is from a high school newspaper. I remember it well. It was March 1964, and I was about to enter my final year of high school. Our house burned down in the middle of the night, about ten minutes after a conflagration burned most of the town center. My house was close to the source of the fire. The flames raged and created stronger winds. People could not talk to each other because of their dry throats caused by the heat. Families with their hair standing on end ran around. I ran up to my room on the second floor. I was still studying at that time, so I had a book and a pencil on my desk. I stood in a room where the temperature was getting hotter and hotter, and I thought, "I will never be able to come back to this room." A friend's letters and an album were the only things that I could hold in my arms. I ran downstairs. My mother was trying to get the children in the car and drive away. The windshield of her...

The prism of self-translation: poiesis and poetics of Yu Guangzhong’s bilingual poetry

ABSTRACT The activity of self-translation may be seen as a mise-en-scène of the hybrid auctorial self, as well as an ideal stage for a reconstruction of meanings, through a second original. As a (re)creative paradigm, self-translation echoes the concept of poiesis as a ‘bringing into appearance’, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, namely as a crystallisation of the refracted facets of language and self. In this connection, the genetic approach may represent a tool to access the aesthetic world of the writer (the poietes) and to explore his (re)creative process. This paper discusses the case-study of the distinguished Taiwanese poet Yu Guangzhong (1928–2017), and his self-translated poetry collected in Shouye ren 守夜人/The Night Watchman. Through a comparative reading of three selected bilingual poems with their manuscript versions, this paper aims to investigate Yu’s poetics of self-translation, while observing through the multi-layered spectrum of a linguistic and cultural rendering.

“Sounds about White!”: countering the erasure of Asian American scholars in critical Whiteness studies

As the field of critical whiteness studies (CWS) grows, some white scholars argue that only whites should undertake the study of whiteness. Other white scholars acknowledge the contributions of scholars of Color to the academy, yet rarely draw on the scholarship of authors of Color to push the field to grow. This commentary critiques these phenomena by tracing the scholarly lineage of CWS and highlighting Asian American scholars’ theorizing of whiteness. It concludes with a bilingual poem to illustrate how Asian American scholars can counter both the exclusion of their voices in CWS and the ongoing violence against the Asian Diasporas as escalated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

#34 Luk Lao

This bilingual poem, using Lao (Isaan dialect) and English, narrates how her genocide survivor, Lao refugee mother uses language as a form of resistance and as a cultural legacy to pass on to her first-generation American born children.

Copla por la muerte de su padre

In this self-translated bilingual poem, Puerto Rican poet Urayoán Noel reflects on life and death in the Caribbean from a contemporary diasporic perspective, recasting the 15th-century Castilian poet Jorge Manrique and his famous version of the copla verse form

Backstage of the Eye

An often-overlooked performative aspect of Roland Barthes' influential approach to the analysis of photography in his Camera Lucida lies in the act of closing one's eyes while studying a photograph. In his article ‘The backstage of the eye—On interrupting sight in order to see’, Jan Kühne presents Barthes' approach as a technique of interrupting eyesight in order to enable a unique experience, which fuses projections of dynamic visual and sonic imagination on the stage of the mind. For its case study, the article focuses on a bilingual ekphrastic poem by renowned Hebrew poet Dan Pagis, which turns a photograph into the stage for an imaginary poetic performance. As key to this synesthetic experience is the phenomenon of simultaneous bilingualism (or: homophonic translation), whose axiomatic principles are further illustrated with the help of a short story by Franz Kafka.

Aj-ts’íib or el letrado ? Authorial Identity in Gómez Navarrete’s Bilingual Maya Poetry

Latin America is witnessing a revival in the literary production of indigenous languages, yet contemporary indigenous writers must often negotiate between different cultural understandings of what literature should be. The purpose of this article is to take one bilingual poem, composed in Yucatec Maya and Spanish, as a case study of the writerly conflict between the Maya paradigm of ts’íib and the ‘Western’ ideal of the letrado. The poem, written by Javier Abelardo Gómez Navarrete (1942-2018), is entitled ‘K’u’uk’um kaan’ in its Yucatec version and ‘Serpiente de regio plumaje’ in its version in Spanish. Through linguistic and hermeneutic analysis of key extracts, the article argues that Gómez Navarrete’s poem can be read as an exploration of what it means to be a Maya writer in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in terms of the antagonistic yet mutually constitutive relationship between the categories of ts’íib and the letrado.

Autotraducción y retraducción en la poesía mapuche: las versiones al mapuzungun de Leonel Lienlaf y Víctor Cifuentes

This article explores the particularities of self-translation and retranslation practices in contemporary Mapuche poetry, based on a case study: the bilingual poem Chonkitun by Leonel Lienlaf, retranslated to Mapuzungun by Víctor Cifuentes. Through a transcomparative analysis of the Spanish and Mapuzungun versions of the work in question, we discuss and reflect on the parameters of innovation, fidelity and authenticity that self-translator and retranslator use in the process of writing and translating the poem, with special attention to its context of production and editing and to the subalternized condition of the Mapuche language and its place in the contemporary Mapuche literary system.

Poetry in TESOL Teacher Education: A Chinese Teacher’s Identity Negotiation and Reconstruction Before and During the Pandemic

This case study explores how Meili (pseudonym), a pre-service teacher in a TESOL and World Language Education program, negotiated and reconstructed her identity as a multilingual graduate student in her emergent bilingual poems through two poetry classes offered in spring 2018 and summer 2019. Her reflections and stories in the interviews are analyzed under the framework of arts-based research. The findings point out that this non-English native multilingual teacher negotiated and reconstructed her emerging teacher-poet identity through bilingual poetry in three main ways: (a) she challenged the long-existing norms and judgments set by her English monolingual peers by bringing her multilingual voice in her English poems, (b) she combined her personal experiences as a multilingual international student in the U.S. to reconstruct an ideal identity that she aspires to as a pre-service teacher, and (c) she used translingual creative writing to exhibit and expand her linguistic and cultural repertoires which contribute to the ongoing construction of her teacher-poet identity. This analysis has implications for poetry and other arts-based approaches to be included in TESOL teacher education to help pre-service and in-service teachers from diverse backgrounds disrupt problematic norms in the field during and after the pandemic. The affordance of poetry also enables multilingual teachers to mediate and reshape their desired teacher identity through their poem writing combined with their life experiences. Keywords: TESOL, teacher education, multilingual teachers, pre-service teachers, poetry

Poetry in TESOL Teacher Education: A Chinese Teacher’s Identity Negotiation and Reconstruction Before and During the Pandemic

This case study explores how Meili (pseudonym), a pre-service teacher in a TESOL and World Language Education program, negotiated and reconstructed her identity as a multilingual graduate student in her emergent bilingual poems through two poetry classes offered in spring 2018 and summer 2019. Her reflections and stories in the interviews are analyzed under the framework of arts-based research. The findings point out that this non-English native multilingual teacher negotiated and reconstructed her emerging teacher-poet identity through bilingual poetry in three main ways: (a) she challenged the long-existing norms and judgments set by her English monolingual peers by bringing her multilingual voice in her English poems, (b) she combined her personal experiences as a multilingual international student in the U.S. to reconstruct an ideal identity that she aspires to as a pre-service teacher, and (c) she used translingual creative writing to exhibit and expand her linguistic and cultural repertoires which contribute to the ongoing construction of her teacher-poet identity. This analysis has implications for poetry and other arts-based approaches to be included in TESOL teacher education to help pre-service and in-service teachers from diverse backgrounds disrupt problematic norms in the field during and after the pandemic. The affordance of poetry also enables multilingual teachers to mediate and reshape their desired teacher identity through their poem writing combined with their life experiences. Keywords: TESOL, teacher education, multilingual teachers, pre-service teachers, poetry

Seven Poems on Migration

Seven Poems on Migration Wendy Call (bio) and Irma Pineda (bio) Translator’s Introduction IRMA PINEDA (BINNIZÁ) has published nine books of poetry. Naxiña’ rului’ladxe’ / Rojo deseo (Red desire), published by Pluralia Ediciones in 2018, won Mexico’s Caballo Verde prize for best book of poetry. She currently serves as senior advisor for science, education, and culture for the MORENA Party in the Mexican National Congress. She is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s National Association of Writers in Indigenous Languages (ELIAC) and was a 2013–15 member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In January 2020, she began a three-year term as one of two representatives of Latin American Indigenous peoples at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Pineda writes bilingual poems in Spanish and in Diidxazá (also known as Isthmus Zapotec). Diidxazá has probably 75,000 speakers and is part of the family of languages known collectively as Zapotec, which has approximately 460,000 speakers (Sistema de Información Cultural [SIC] Mexico 2020). Pineda creates what she calls “parallel poems,” one version in Diidxazá and another in Spanish, reflecting her lived experience: a constant flow between two languages, two cultures, two cosmovisions. Educated in Spanish-only public schools in her hometown of Juchitán, Pineda learned to write in Isthmus Zapotec by looking up words one by one in books she borrowed from her neighbors’ bookshelves. At that time, there was no proper Isthmus Zapotec dictionary. Years later, Pineda’s mother, Cándida Santiago Pineda, founded the first (and still the only) library in her family’s neighborhood in Juchitán, in Mexico’s southeastern state of Oaxaca (Pineda 2012). Fewer and fewer children in Juchitán grow up speaking fluent Diidxazá. [End Page 145] Meanwhile, Diidxazá vocabulary shrinks under the relentless pressure of Spanish. Irma Pineda and other bilingual Indigenous writers in Mexico describe their literary work as “language rescue,” as well as artistic expression. That dual intent is often unappreciated by Mexico’s wider literary community, which long excluded them. Until recently, Mexican bookstores would shelve Indigenous writers’ fiction, poetry, essays, and drama under “Anthropology” rather than “Mexican Literature.” In a 2008 essay, Irma Pineda explained, “Indigenous Mexican cultures are developing a literature that recovers the cosmovisions and aesthetic values of our own cultures, strengthens our languages by reincorporating archaic words and creating neologisms, and also integrates the concerns of a globalized world with local community reflection” (Pineda 2008, 1). The poems published here are drawn from Pineda’s 2007 poetry collection, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos (Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like River Water), published by Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas (ELIAC), a national Mexican association of Indigenous-language authors. ELIAC began its own publishing house because traditional Mexican publishing houses did not take their members’ literatures seriously (Pineda 2012). Like many of Pineda’s poetry collections, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ has a strong narrative arc; each poem serves as a microchapter in a highly compressed story in poems. It is a collection of persona poems told in two fictional voices from Pineda’s hometown: a person who has immigrated to the United States as an undocumented worker and that person’s partner, who has stayed at home. Pineda’s home community, Juchitán, has experienced heavy outmigration as people leave for jobs in Mexican cities, along the U.S.-Mexico border region, or in the United States. The current migration crisis in the United States—government officials separating families; government officials refusing to allow political, economic, and ecological refugees to apply for asylum; and children housed in cages—makes the poems of Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ urgently important. These persona poems weave a narrative about the physical and emotional challenges of migration under less dire conditions than those we are currently seeing. In the dozen years since these poems were first published in Mexico City, the situation for Pineda’s friends and neighbors who migrate to the United States has grown more awful than we could have imagined. Pineda...

Cosmic narratology and human exceptionalism in Maya poetry: Villegas’ Yáax K’áak’ [Primordial Fire

ABSTRACT Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, a pioneering literary movement has taken root and flourished in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeast Mexico. The Maya Literary Renaissance (MLR) is part of a wider Latin American endeavour to revitalise indigenous languages still spoken today. The MLR is also an ecologically inspired movement given its significant focus on the nonhuman environment. This article examines the ecological significance of Wildernain Villegas’ bilingual poem (Maya and Spanish), Yáax K’áak’/Fuego Primigenio [Primordial Fire]. By engaging the poem in dialogue with the philosophies of Michel Serres, Charles Sanders Peirce and Paul Ricoeur, the article makes two interconnected arguments: that Primordial Fire presents literature as a phenomenon that emerges from an underlying narratological potential in the universe, and that, while the poem presents a vision of human exceptionalism, it grounds this vision on our ability to de-centre ourselves by engaging with our more-than-human origins.

Drawing Maps for Research in Creative Writing through A/r/tography

The return of Creative Writing to the academia was intended as an answer to rigid approaches employed in the nineteenth century’s teaching of English Literature. This comeback has since brought back a new perspective in seeing body of literature as a living body but at the same time also introduced clash between dominating research paradigm in the academia. The writers who were hired to teach creative writing tended to prioritise their creative practice, while the general consensus in academia called for more theoretical-oriented research. In order to compromise, the practice-based research method was born. Despite various justifications that creative process is the same as research inquiry, the heavier emphasis on creative works in this method still invites criticism, such as the lack of research rigour (Biggs & Büchler, 2007). New framework to balance and bridge practice and research rigour is thus needed – especially one that can accommodate the non-linear thinking trajectories in creative practices. Due to the possible non-linearity, the new research platform should not follow the reigning ‘arborescent scheme’ in the academic research tradition, but incorporate the concept of Deleuzian rhizome. A/r/tography – developed based on the premise of art and art creation as a rhizomatic process / activity – is proposed as one of the potential practices for creative writing research. The non-linear view of a/r/tography towards arts practices suggests a rhizomatic role in the mapping of creative writing process. As it addresses and accommodates multiplicities, a/r/tography also facilitates non-native English speakers to conduct and map his journey in art creation and research inquiry. Author’s project of writing a collection of bilingual poems based on classical Javanese song cycle – Sekar Macapat – is presented to illustrate the claim.

Drawing Maps for Research in Creative Writing through A/r/tography

The essay aims to review clashes in research methodologies for creative practices–especially Creative Writing–and to propose a possible solution to bridge it. A/r/tography–a research methodology developed based on the premise of art and art creation as a rhizomatic process/activity–is elaborated here as a middle ground between opposing schemes. The author’s project of writing a collection of bilingual poems based on classical Javanese song cycle–Sekar Macapat–is presented to illustrate how a/r/tography can be used to address various multiplicities and non-linear process in creative process.

Self-Translation as a Taypi ch'ixi: Discontent and Resistance in Four Mapuche Poets

Self-translation is a widespread practice in the literary production of Latin American indigenous authors. We propose to understand such a procedure as a space of resistance and discontent with the (post)colonial situation. In this sense, the concept of the taypi ch’ixi by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui allows for the un-derstanding of subjectivity and cultural identity in a dialectic without synthesis between opposing forces that complement and antagonize. In a movement of permanent tension, cultural and linguistic borders articulate “the autochthonous with the alien in subversive and mutually contaminating ways” (Rivera Cusi-canqui), thus creating an intermediate place, a taypi ch’ixi, where celebration and misery converge, where creative productivity and the pain of colonization interact. We consider that Mapuche bilingual poetry—written in Mapudungun and Spanish—is an example of such a taypi ch’ixi in which the texts or “ver-sions” are weaved together by contradictions without dissolution. The concept will be confronted with texts authored by four contemporary Mapuche poets with diverse sociolinguistic trajectories: Adriana Paredes Pinda, Liliana Ancalao, Maria Teresa Panchillo, and Rayen Kvyeh. We will delve into essays, interviews, annexes to anthologies, prologues, and bilingual poems in order to ‘listen’ to the authors’ reflections on their double register writing and to experience the mutu-ally subversive interactions of the languages involved.

Eatin’ Tail, Suckin’ Head: Moving across the French Americas with Queer Talk about Food

This article considers Cajun poetry in French since the 1960s in the context of the various migrations that have defined the French Americas. In particular, it focuses on Beverly Matherne’s 1999 bilingual poem, “Je vas vendre mon chasse-neige/Sellin’ My Snow Blowin’ Machine” in relation to the foodways that have developed over the course of the migrations that resulted in Acadians becoming Cajuns. Through queer culinary associations, Matherne not only blurs the distinction between normative and queer, she also challenges the insider/outsider distinction through which Franco-Americans have been othered and marginalized. More broadly, this article makes a case for moving French studies away from its European metropolitan centre to the New World, a move that also pushes American studies away from its standard Anglocentrism and favours understanding French as, among other things, an American language that must cease to be so marginal in American studies.

Where Truth is not Itself: Laura Riding’s Life of the Dead

Laura Riding’s Life of the Dead (1933) is a strange, morbid, bilingual poem in French and English that poetically renders ten engravings by John Aldridge. In this poem, Riding appears to deliberately misdirect the reader, so that this bizarre poem hovers between the comic and the morbid. As a lesson in uncertainties and indetermination, The Life of the Dead represents an example of a poet’s practice in contradiction with her theory. For while Riding identifies poetry with rigorously self-identical Truth, The Life of the Dead seems bent on emphasizing its lack of self-identity, its multiplicity of meaning and impression. Translation – both from image to text, and from French to English – vividly demonstrates this lack of self-identity, so that the poem appears divided against itself. Laura Riding herself occupies an analogous paradoxical position in Anglo-American poetry: while constantly working to distinguish and distance herself from her contemporaries and from critics and exegetes, poems like The Life of the Dead grapple with the same problems of ambiguity and negativity that have been the hallmark of poetic modernity since Mallarmé. Hence, in this bizarre poem, Riding appears to operate at once on the margins and at the center of modernist poetic practice.

Interlingual Encounter in Pierre Garnier and Niikuni Seiichi’s French-Japanese Concrete Poetry

In the latter half of the 1960s, without meeting each other and without knowing each other’s language, French poet Pierre Garnier and Japanese poet Niikuni Seiichi 新国誠一 collaborated to create French-Japanese concrete poems. This essay examines the interlingual encounters in the two poets’ bilingual poems that facilitate exchange beyond linguistic boundaries. It argues that Garnier and Niikuni’s bilingual concrete poems are grounded not so much in metaphorical significance as in interlingual contiguity, with reference to Jakobson’s view of the poetic function. Since the creation of a syntagmatic dimension between the two languages is a basic step in the making of the French-Japanese poems, the prevalence of contiguity affects both combination and selection of poetic materials. In light of Garnier and Niikuni’s collaboration, the essay proposes the beginning of an interlingual poetics that, in contrast to the primacy of equivalence in Jakobsonian poetics, foregrounds the role of contiguity in bridging the languages involved and staging an interlingual encounter. The instigation of an interlingual poetics also involves the creation of interlingual contiguity through spatial syntagms, an approach that Garnier and Niikuni’s collaboration demonstrates as viable. By opening up the text to invite contingencies and accidents in the combination of words, spatial syntagms contribute to a reevaluation of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy in the operation of language.