Foreign Tongues: Bengali

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. These recurring Foreign Tongues posts offer some culture and history—a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

While I know we’re lucky enough to have a diverse readership, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of you were unfamiliar with quite a few of the languages featured in our International section. Or maybe I’m just projecting . . . which is quite possible, because as I leafed through Issue 42, I came across what was, to me, a beautiful jumble of script that would look great as a tattoo. The first (uneducated) guess I had was that this was Hindi script. Little did I know that what I was seeing was Bengali, or Bangla, the second-most spoken language in India, the official language of Bangladesh, and a language with an amazingly contentious and passionate history.

 Bengali is part of the Indo-European language family. This is the same (extremely) general branch that English falls into, so technically, Bengali and English have a common root. Below, though, you can see just how linguistically distant they are.

Bengali and English indicated with green arrows

This distance lends itself to untranslatable words and meanings like, for instance, the fact that there is no specific word for have in Bengali. Right. That means all of the following things we take for granted in English aren’t there for us in Bengali:

• To have your mother’s eyes
• To have and to hold
• To have or have not
• To have fun
• To have an ace up your sleeve
• To have no idea
• To have your cake and eat it, too
• To have a cold
• To have to go

And from there, you also can’t access any of the conjugations of have, i.e. has, had, etc. Well, how do you say things like that, then? There are definitely ways to express those general ideas, but as Westerners, we have (hah!) to be able to change the way we think about the world. Most languages spoken in the Western world are centered on the individual. As a society, we’re acutely individualistic. Everything we express—verbally or in writing—places us, as individuals, as the focus. From that point of view, we discuss the world in a sort of one-way dialogue. (When I first learned this as an undergrad, this was a sticking point for a while. How else could you view the world? I would wonder, as my linguistics prof skipped on to his next exciting point about berries being their own food group in Norway . . . ) Any time we say “I/you/we have,” we put ourselves as the center of action, and let whatever else we’re talking about play second fiddle as dependent on the fact that, first, there is—and must be—a you, I, we, etc. to affix the secondary object or person to.

 Contrast our me-me-me point of view with that of Bengali (and many other languages), which discusses the world through a complex, reciprocal pattern of interrelationships that has no concrete center, and that allows everything and everyone to interact on a level playing field, linguistically. A very dry, very basic way of explaining this is by understanding that generally, Bengali language structures itself something like this:



          X is to me

 

      or



          with me is X



The fact that no one goes around saying “I have” suggests (and I’m guessing here) that there might also not be a verb for “to be.” I say this only because if you can’t say “I have,” it seems likely that you also wouldn’t express the English claim to existence, “I am,” which is the epitome of individual-centeredness. Ask Stephen Crane. He knows what I’m talking about. These are (obviously) enormous linguistic differences, but they don’t only tell us how linguistically different English and Bengali are, they also tell us how disparate these cultures and their worldviews are.*



So now imagine being an English-speaking translator and finding these amazing poems in Bengali that you really want to translate. Taking the cultural and linguistic differences into account . . . how do you get the author’s message across? Any translator will tell you that taking a piece of writing from one language to another involves more than your multilingual dictionary and the help of Google Translate.

Opening stanzas: "Conjugal Prayer"

In Issue 42, Carolyne Wright discusses just that—translating Shamim Azad’s Bengali poetry and the difficulty of capturing and faithfully representing the cultural aspects of that poetry. After all of that linguistic difficulty we just talked about, there are still other aspects that are just as arduous to get right. Wright specifically calls out trying to translate the idea of what she calls a “dream city,” which is the mythical city of Ālaka. (Information on the city can also be found under Alaka, Alakapuri, and Alkapuri, which makes for some interesting Google searches. I have never been more annoyed at Alaska.) This dream city has a ton of cultural weight in Bengali, but in English, Wright struggled to find an equivalent. “Ālaka could be translated as “El Dorado” or even “Oz” to convey the sense of a fantastical city of unimaginable wealth and splendor, ” she says. But neither of these cities quite conveys the cultural significance of Ālaka.


From “Conjugal Prayer”



    How can I live with a saint in perpetual meditation

    who renounces everything at night

                                    and goes off to some dream city?



In Hindu mythology, Ālaka is described as a fabulous, hidden Himalayan city—the city of wealth, and the City of the Blessed. This is where Kuvera, the god of wealth, reigns, and the city is described as having a golden lotus-lake, golden houses, and crystal palaces. It’s enclosed by a golden wall and is a place where every desire is indulged.


Kuvera, god of wealth

As Wright has already pointed out, that description of Ālaka is a far cry from the Emerald City of Oz or El Dorado. The contemporary Emerald City, with its creepy behind-the-curtain, wish-granting wizard and its personified nonhumans falls into the fable-fabulous, just as Ālaka does, but has less of a mythological significance or religious aspect. (I know some of you are protesting this last point, but we can deconstruct The Wizard of Oz later. Right now, let's focus!) In similar failure, El Dorado, the city of unimaginable wealth (and unimaginable bloodshed), only matches the wealth aspect of Ālaka’s characteristics. So if we had a Dorado City of Oz, we might get closer to the cultural sense of this city, but we’re still a bit off.

Ālaka is no one-hit wonder—it has a rich literary history. It’s a city of the gods, the setting of mythological stories that answer the questions why and where did we come from. In the end, Wright’s selection of dream city is probably for the best. As she explains, “The expression “dream city” [allows] readers of the translation to understand the poet’s intention here . . . ” By not weighing her selection down with culturally predetermined ideas of what each alternate city might suggest, she leaves the poem to speak for itself.
... ... ... ...

To read poetry from Shamim Azad, as translated by Carolyne Wright, check out the International section of Issue 42.



Hear Azad’s poetry in the original Bengali, as she reads to the music of After Art Band:


Conjugal Prayer (mentions Ālaka)
Waiting for the Touch
I Want to Pierce with the Arrows of My Voice



*If you know more about this and can reign in my hypothesis, leave some info for us in comments!

Foreign Tongues: Danish

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.
in the first place). So let's begin, shall we?

By now, you've probably figured out my format--introduce the language I'm talking about, give a little background info, shamelessly name a few famous people associated with the language, and finally, tie it back to HFR (which is where I find languages to write about in the first place). So let's begin, shall we?

Danish. Not necessarily an “unusual” language or a language that might make you say “wait, what?” when it pops up in conversation. It's one of the languages most people realize on some level must exist, because they learned about a place called Denmark in geography class, and there's always a language that goes with the country, right? Still, it’s not something most public schools offer as a second language (or maybe I'm just living in the wrong part of the country). But Danish is spoken by over six million people around the world, most of them living in the country of Denmark right above Germany.

Famous people. My favorite part of these posts is looking up the country the language hails from and figuring out people or events I know of, but didn't necessarily know were connected to the country and the language. It's a comforting form of the unexpected. This time, the people that made my list include (but are not limited to): Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard and three of the band members from Aqua (René Dif, Claus Norréen, and Søren Rasted). This is my most exciting list yet—I used to read Anderson’s fairy tales as a kid; I studied Bohr’s atomic model in high school (although I was never taught much of anything about the man himself); and as a kid because I liked to listen to Aqua’s music, even though I thought they were just singing about Barbie dolls and candy (I was sheltered).

Now it's time to let you all know how HFR brought this language, and consequently my favorite foreign tongues famous people list to-date, to my attention. I found, in #44, a travel essay written by Pia Tafdrup and translated by K. E. Semmel. The first line to catch my eye was "Even for the city's children, the festival is an important event. The children stream out of houses to join the huge procession, especially when Indifference and Forgetfulness are buried and those in costumes groove to the beat of drums and numerous other instruments. They scurry in and out of the carriages that carry the caskets." Then I looked back to the first line of the essay and the sense of poetry that image gave me, made sense. "How do you get a small child to associate poetry with something exciting and meaningful?" I really should start reading things in order.

After contacting and eliciting answers from K. E. Semmel, he brought quite a few points to my attention about the difficulties and hazards of translating. There were too many to sum up, so I decided to include the interview at the end of the post, for you to read as you please. Two of these points I want to highlight here. First, he summed up for me exactly what I thought the best part of translating was when he said, "What I like about translating is hitting the right notes, finding the perfect word in English." When that happens, I think it is always an epic "ah-ha!" moment. Point two: he told me the interesting fact that, at least in the example he gave to me, "in the subordinate clause, the subject...and the verb...are reversed in Danish. Obviously you can't translate them in reverse order in English. Any reader would instantly recognize it as a poor translation--literal translations tend to jar the flow." It was yet another example of how different languages have to be treated differently when being translated into English. Also, I might just sympathize a little bit with the fact that backwards sentences or clauses so often are found in Foreign Languages, and Danish happens to be one of them.

There is a lot of complications in translating any language. Semmel's example is one more on the long list, but when the result of finding a way around the complications is that more people get to read wonderful pieces of writing like Tafdrup's travel essay, how can it not be worth it?

1) Why did you choose to learn Danish? Why did you stay with it and become a translator?
I didn't choose Danish so much as it chose me, so to speak: I met and fell in love with a Danish woman (now my wife). I had learned German, studied it as part of my graduate program. As soon as grad school was over, we moved to Denmark and lived for several years. Picking up Danish, at that point, was a little easier—insofar that my understanding of German helped me read Danish. But the truly hard part came with pronunciation. Danish can be a very difficult sound to imitate, especially the letters å, y, and ø. The sounds seem to come from the bottom of the throat, not the top as American English does. The name Børge still kills me. I started translating because A) I love literature, and B) because I knew I could translate—knew I could use my language skills to bring a lot of great new authors to the attention of American readers.

2) What is the most difficult part of translating Danish?
Whether it’s Danish or some other language, translation is a difficult process. For a text to undergo a transformation from one language to the next requires careful attention to detail: How do you make the translated story/poem/essay true to the original at the same time you make it sound like a fluid translation? Make it sound like the language you're translating into. That’s really the heart of the matter, and I think the most difficult part. It would be the same whatever language you translate.

3) What is the most interesting part of translating Danish?
Same answer as number two, really. What I like about translating is hitting the right notes, finding the perfect word in English. When it goes well and you know you’ve got it right, that’s a great feeling for any translator. It's no different from writing a story or poem. Getting a sentence to flow the way you dreamed it is an intoxicating experience. Translation actually makes me more aware of my own language.

4) How does Danish differ from English grammatically or structurally?
Well, I’m not sure how to answer this question in a short blog post. One big difference lies in syntax. Take this example from one of my Simon Fruelund translations ("The World and Varvara"): Jeg tænder båndoptageren og stiller et enkelt lidt forsigtigt spørgsmål, og snart er hun i gang med at fortælle om sin tidligste barndom."

In main clauses such as "Jeg tænder båndoptageren og stiller et enkelt lidt forsigtigt spørgsmål....", the syntax is very much like English. So in my translation that part reads: "I ("jeg") click ("tænder") on the recorder ("båndoptageren") and ask a single, rather cautious question ("og stiller et enkelt lidt forsigtigt spørgsmål").

But in the subordinate clause, the subject ("hun") and verb ("er") are reversed in Danish. Obviously you can't translate them in reverse order in English. Any reader would instantly recognize it as a poor translation—literal translations tend to jar the flow.

5) A big part of the blog posts is the idea that every language is strongly based on and/or influenced by culture. What are some of the strongest cultural influences on Danish?
I’m not an expert on this, but I’d say the strongest influences on Danish are the English language and English-speaking television, particularly American. Language changes with each generation. With more and more outside influences on Danish culture coming from the English-speaking world, from pop stars to television programs, the more English words and phrases creep into the language. When my wife was a child, she pretty much had Danish, Scandinavian, German, Eastern European, and British programming on television. American shows (like Dallas) were a popular novelty. But today the influence of, say, Friends or The Daily Show—even the Super Bowl—can be seen in everyday speech, which then gets absorbed into the literature. Of course, this phenomenon is not new. Words are appropriated whenever any two languages meet in a significant way. We see this in English with words like schadenfreude or smorgasbord. I even hear friends say "scheisse" when "shit" would work just as well. This is not at all a bad thing. I like this dynamic. It means that language is continually evolving.

6) Are there any major trends in writing styles in Danish? How is it different from English?
There are so many ways to tell a story—regardless what language you write in—and so many different writers, each one having his or her take on what a story is and how best to tell it. I don’t think you can narrow down a list of trends, not in any way that does justice to a nation’s literature. About the only thing I will say is that many Danish stories tend, I have found, to not have neat, identifiable endings—sometimes to the point where you're left wondering what it is you just read. Because Danish writers are better supported by the government than in many other countries, less reliant on mega sales of books, I think there's a greater sense of freedom to experiment a little.

7) How is the writing style influenced by the culture?
This is a very interesting question. One thing that I’m fascinated by at the moment is the role of social media on literature, if it has one. In social media the focus is on these short bursts of information—tweets, status updates—and we’re getting used to reading this way, even thinking this way. (How many times do you find yourself thinking, “That’d be a great status update”?) You would think that this way of thinking would carry over into literature, right? Like it does in so-called “twitterature.” But it hasn’t really carried over in any meaningful way, not to my way of thinking. At least not yet. Most of the books you find in traditional brick and mortar stores resemble books that were published ten years ago, at least in the sense that they’re told in traditional narrative styles. (Which isn’t to say that more experimental books haven’t been published—just that they’ve not reached a mass audience yet. That may change. This NY Times article suggests more and more young readers are going the e-reader route.) I think that might be because people are still looking for stories to be full, rich, and big. And that is because the full, rich, and big stories are still what we read in schools—traditional narratives, in other words. When non-traditional narratives become standard fare in schools and colleges, then we may see a radical shift in our dominant manner of storytelling. Until then, or until some groundbreaking author paves the way for everyone else, I don’t expect much to change. So if by “culture” you mean “book culture”—where literature is produced and disseminated by readers and writers—then it’s probably going to be a slow process. I think writers are reluctant to jump on fads. I mean, according to this Guardian article, they haven't even begun to really incorporate the Internet yet.

K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, the Washington Post, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best European Fiction 2011, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. He has translated Danish authors Pia Tafdrup, Jytte Borberg, and Simon Fruelund, among others. His translation of Norwegian crime novelist Karin Fossum’s next book will be published later this year. He has received translation grants from the Danish Arts Council.

Foreign Tongues: հայերէն (Armenian)

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

This time around I decided to tackle the Armenian language and culture with a little help from Diana Der-Hovanessian and the internet. In HFR #47, there are several poems by Armenian poet Vahe Arsen, translated by Diana Der-Hovanessian.

So, first things first—first things being a little bit of background on Armenia. Armenia is in the middle of things. It's in the middle of a juncture of the land masses of Western Asia, Northern Africa, and Eastern Europe, in the Caucaus region, with a lot of countries surrounding it, including Turkey, Georgia, and Iran. For those of us who are image-oriented, there's a world map with Armenia marked on it in green to your right. It was part of the Soviet Union before that was dissolved. The language has a script unique to itself, which I find looks like English just enough to confuse me when I see it out of the corner of my eye (meaning it doesn't really look like English at all).

Looking around. I found some interesting people with either Armenian heritage, citizenship, or, of course, both. The band members of System of a Down all can lay claim to Armenian heritage. So can the guy who invented the color TV, the inventor of the MRI, and the one who invented the PET scan.

The list shows a painful de-emphasis of the arts in Armenia. Even Vahe Arsen has pointed out Armenia's lack of attention paid to literature. Why? It's not because what's been written is so horrible Godzilla would run away from it. Der-Hovanessian described the Armenian language as "a very musical language" when I asked, and she adds that the hardest part about translating Armenian poetry into English is that "the poem's music is easy to lose in a second language." Their language is beautiful, their poetry is musical. In the translation of Arsen's poem "Allegory," (one of the poems Der-Hoavnessian translated for HFR) the language gets your ears involved in the reading, like in the lines "The wind singing a ghost song/ is interrupted by a wheezing/radio whispering the allegory/ of rain that lasts/ a hundred years." The mystery then is why the lack of emphasis on literature, on the beauty of the language as it is written down? Der-Hovanessian also gave me some insight into this by telling me, "the third main [cultural] influence [on Armenian poetry] is the genocide of 1915 by the Ottoman Turks that removed three-fourths of the population (the entire readership) and that genocide started with the execution of 250 poets! Poets, who wrote in oblique ways to give hope to the people were the first to be jailed and killed. Then the entire population was uprooted...That would be a big influence on literature, don't you agree?"

Thankfully, poets and writers haven't been completely wiped out in Armenia (although is it really possible to kill art completely?), and even better, translators like Diana Der-Hovanessian bring that art to us, encouraging the Armenian writers even more.

Foreign Tongues: 日本語(Japanese)

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

You probably know things about Japan. The Ring is based off of a Japanese horror movie. Japanese people like tea. They wear funky clothing—either traditional kimonos or fun and weird outfits such as might be found in Harajuku. Tokyo is the capital of Japan. The characters the Japanese write with are a combination of characters “borrowed” from the Chinese and characters that were altered from Chinese characters, creating new Japanese characters. You might know the works of Haruki Murakami, which have been translated into more than forty languages.

Someone you might not know is Itō Hiromi, a contemporary Japanese poet who is nationally acclaimed and has won many awards in Japan. She was born in 1955 in Tokyo and became well-known as a poet in the 1980s. Much of her work focuses on women’s issues including motherhood and pregnancy. Killing Kanako: Selected Poems of Itō Hiromi, translated into English and published in 2009, deals largely with these issues.

One of interesting things about Itō Hiromi is how she uses colloquial speech in her poetry when Japanese usually has very strict forms and guidelines for writing—and speaking. It's a highly formalized and hierarchical language. I've been taking Japanese classes for a couple of years now, and I've had to learn three different forms of Japanese to date—regular, slightly formal speech (like you might use when you're talking to stranger; we'll call this the "intermediate level"); regular, plain speech (like you might use with your friends and what Hiromi uses in her poetry); and honorific speech (used in inferior/superior situations). That sounds pretty similar to English, because after all, we don't speak the same with our friends as we do with our bosses, but Japanese takes this idea and explodes into outer space with it. As not-so-quick example from Hiromi's poem "A Poem for Ueno-San" featured in HFR #41, take the line "人がおおぜい立ってそれを見ている (hito ga oozei tatte sore wo miteiru)" which is translated as "Many people stood by to watch." It's written nice and simple in the plainest form. If you were to change to the highest form I mentioned earlier, honorific, the verb "miteiru" would change to "gorannatteimasu." Both words mean the same thing. One just takes a lot longer to say. The part that really stinks for the natives who have to learn this stuff, not speaking in the proper form to your boss can get you fired.

Poetry and written word in Japanese have always been very much part of the hierarchy of the language—it has its place and its form, and you don’t deviate from that. You don’t use colloquial speech, or at least you haven’t until recently. Hiromi uses it, and she does it effectively. She’s gotten the attention and respect of her country using a form of speech that isn’t highly formalized, but it still works for Japan.

Foreign Tongues: Faroese

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen was a Scandinavian writer. He is from one of the islands close to Iceland. I researched him because of the post I did on Iceland. He is not in Hayden's Ferry Review but his work has been around for a while now. He wrote a single novel titled Barbara: Roman before he died at the age of 37 (he was sick a lot). He is also one of only five writers born between 1900 and 1903 who represent literature from a country that had no recognized prior literary tradition. The country is the Faroe Islands and the language is Faroese. Jacobsen is internationally known although most of his notoriety came after his death. His novel Barbara:Roman was even made into a movie in 1997 nearly sixty years after his death. Barbara:Roman is a story about a minister who falls in love with a sexually promiscuous woman, marries her, and all the drama that is involved with marrying a promiscuous woman. I love it.

Faroese is a language spoken by about 73,000 people in the world. Most of the people who speak the language live in the Faroe Islands. It is an Indo-European language directly descended from the Old West Norse language, with Icelandic being its closest relative. Like many languages that are spoken by a minority people in the world, Faroese was abolished--by the Danes after the Reformation in 1536. The Danes banned its use in schools, churches, and official documents.

The Faroe Islands are wreathed in mystery; it is unknown when the Faroese people came to the islands. There is a great deal of speculation that some of the people came to the islands due to persecution from Norway and Denmark. Others speculate that they are of Celtic decent and moved due to proximity. According to scientific evidence that traced the Faroe Islanders' DNA, the Faroese are half Scandinavian and half Scots/Irish.

Foreign Tongues: Icelandic

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

When people think of Iceland they don’t think of the language or their poetry, they think of Vikings. They might also think of how Iceland was named: It was given the name Iceland by the Vikings so that no one would go there but would instead go to Greenland. It was a deceptive name because Iceland is warm with nice weather and Greenland is cold. Those tricky Vikings! Iceland has other things besides Vikings and that its great poetry and is its beautiful language, Icelandic. Johann Hjálmarsson is an internationally known poet who writes in Icelandic. Hjálmarsson was born in Iceland in 1939. When he was 17, working as a printer’s apprentice, he wrote his first book of poems. Critics were so impressed by his work that they encouraged him to study abroad. Hjálmarsson took their advice and studied abroad in Barcelona. There he learned the romance languages. He then proceeded to translate Federico Garcia Lorca into Icelandic. He become a literary and art reviewer for an Icelandic magazine, traveled the world for his work, and wrote poetry. His life is like a fairy tale from printer’s apprentice to world traveler. Some of his work can be found in issue #37 of HFR.

Icelandic, like English, has its roots in German. It is spoken by about 320,000 people in the world, most of whom reside in Iceland. Iceland used to be the westernmost country with speakers of Indo-European languages; then the Americas were “discovered.” The oldest texts written in Icelandic are poetry and laws, which were orally passed down and then written. Iceland’s most famous text is appropriately called the Icelandic Sagas, which is written in Old Icelandic. Old Icelandic and Icelandic are not very different; they are similar to Elizabethan English and present day English.

Icelanders are some of the most homogeneous of all European countries mostly due to their isolation. They are a mix of descendents from the British Isles and from Scandinavia. This is probably why their language has Germanic roots. They were ruled by the Norwegians, then the Danes, and finally got independence from the Danes in 1944. It is interesting that even while they were colonized by the Norwegians and the Danes they still managed to keep their language intact without very many changes. When they got their independence they made Icelandic their official language.

Foreign Tongues: Isthmus Zapotec

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

Victor Teran is a Mexican poet who writes not in Spanish, language of the conquerors, but in a little known language by the name of Isthmus Zapotec. Teran was born in Juchitán de Zaragoza in 1958. The city is located in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He is a well-established poet in Mexico, with many works published in anthologies and magazines. Although he is considered a poet, he has also written novels in Zapotec. When he is not traveling the world showcasing his poetry, his day job is a teacher of media education in the Oaxacan Isthmus.

Zapotec is a varied language, meaning that there are different dialects and versions of the language. The names people call it in their dialect or version vary from Diidxaza to Didxsaj. What’s really interesting about Zapotec is that some of the dialects and variants are completely different. One person speaking in one dialect will not understand another person speaking in a different dialect. Because of these differences, the Mexican government now recognizes about 60 Zapotec languages. Zapotec is related to Chatino, which is a sub group of the Oto-Manguean family, which is mostly spoken in Mesoamerica. Oto-Manguean is a family comprised of Native American languages. Another cool thing about Isthmus Zapotec is that it got its current alphabet in the 1950s.

The Zapotec civilization is about 2500 years old. Zapotecs or present day speakers of Zapotec, live in the same Valley of Oaxaca as their ancestors. Although Zapotecs have been using the Isthmus Zapotec alphabet only since the 1950s, they did have ancient writings using glyphs. Zapotecs also have a different cuisine then many other Mexicans and Native Americans. In their enchiladas, for example, they put a variety of black mole as their stuffing. They also eat iguana and armadillo. So if you are ever in the Valley of Oaxaca don’t forget the enchiladas!

Teran's work, translated by David Shook, appeared in HFR issue #45.

Foreign Tongues: Ladino

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

Dr. Avner Perez speaks and writes in a language that - according to Wikipedia - is only spoken by about 100,000 people in the world, give or take a couple hundred. He speaks Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, as it is sometimes called. Perez was born in Jerusalem in 1942. He is a translator and writer of poetry. He is one of the few people in the world who actually writes in Ladino. His poems have appeared in many places around the world from Europe to the Americas. In 1992 he founded the Maale Adumim Institute for the Study of Judeo-Spanish and culture, his way of continuing the learning of Ladino.

Ladino is a language that has many roots. It is derived mostly from Castilian, which apparently is another name for Spanish. (If ever you want to tell someone you speak another language and Spanish sounds too mundane, try Castilian.) Ladino also has a million and one names including Judezmo, Djudeo-Espanyol, and Spaniolit. Ladino used to be widely spoken in the Balkans, Turkey, Middle East, and North Africa. The Jews brought it there when they were expelled from Spain in 1492. (Side note: The expulsion was called the Alhambra Decree issued by the Spanish Monarchs Isabella I of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon.) Ladino is also a mixture of languages from all the places the Jews emigrated to after their expulsion. Those languages include Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, and a host of other languages. So a whopping 30% of the language is a mixture of other languages with the rest being Castilian. When the Spanish Jews immigrated to the Ottoman Empire they were allowed to keep their language and customs. So the language was preserved for 500 years. In the Ottoman Empire the language was known as Yahudice or Jewish language. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire many of the Spanish Jews who lived there moved throughout Europe, and then of course the Holocaust hit. Many of the Jews who spoke the language were killed. After WWII many of the Jews who spoke Ladino moved to Israel. To this day most of the people who speak Ladino live in Israel. The translator for Dr. Perez’s poems, Brenda Serotte, has this to say about Ladino “Language, like one’s name, is personal. It’s important to me to keep Ladino alive. In doing so, I have recreated my cultural traditions.”

You can find examples of Dr. Perez’s poetry in HFR issue #45.

Foreign Tongues: Catalan

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

Josef Piera is a tough guy to research because he hasn’t done very much work in English. He has not been featured in Hayden’s Ferry Review, but I wanted to focus on Catalan, a language most people don't seem to be familiar with. Piera is a poet and essayist. He speaks multiple languages including Spanish, Catalan, and Arabic. He has even translated some of his works into Arabic. Born in Beniopa, a province of Valencia, he is renowned for his poetry and essays in Spain. He is most famous though for his biography of Ausias March, a poet of the 13^th century. Piera says about his poetry: "Poetry is what is left after you have had the good times. You eat the apple and are left with the core: that is poetry."

Before beginning this series of posts, I didn't realize Spain had so many cultural groups. Unlike the Basque people (who I wrote about here), Catalans are not of mysterious origin. The earliest known reference to Catalans as a group is in 1120 in an Italian epic poem. Most Catalans are from the region known as Catalonia although there is a large population in southern France. Catalonia is part of Spain though it is an autonomous community, and has been since Franco died. The capital of Catalonia is Barcelona.

About 7 million people in Catalonia speak Catalan, although most are either bilingual in Spanish or trilingual in Spanish and another language. The roots of the language are Latin so they share many similarities with the other Romance languages. They are a mixture of Italian, Spanish, and French. Although Catalan is most similar with Occitan which is another romance language in the region. On a side note, some famous Catalonians you may have heard of include Salvador Dali the surrealist painter, Antoni Gaudi the architect, and Catharine of Aragon the first wife of King Henry VIII.

Here is a link to some of Piera’s poetry.

Foreign Tongues: The Basque Country

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages. Here's our first one!

In Issue #45 Bernardo Atxaga’s poetry was profiled in the international section. Born in Basque Country in 1951 he writes his poetry in Euskara, the language of his people. He says, “If it comes to it, I could make use of my other languages, Spanish and French. A minority language doesn’t imprison a writer for the simple reason that it always come along with another language for company.”

The Basques are a people of mysterious origin and are probably the oldest indigenous people living group in Europe. There are approximately 18 million Basque people or people of Basque decent in the world, with about 2.5 million living in part of Spain and France in what is called Basque Country. They have their own newspaper, radio, and educational system. The Basque country is not completely autonomous; they are still under Spanish and French rule, although they do have a separatist group that is fighting for complete autonomy.

Euskara is a mysterious language with no root in any language known in the world. Scientists and linguists have theories for where the language came from, but no definitive evidence. The language itself has been kept alive due in no small part to the Basque people and their resistance against both Spanish and French governments. It is said to be one of the older languages because some of their words have roots in the word rock, which linguists say could mean the language has been around since the Stone Ages, when stone tools were used.

A list of some Basque authors include Miguel de Unamuno, Jose Manterola, Lucia Etxebarria, and Gabriel Aresti.