Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

11. Translating the Boundary between Life and Death in O’odham Devil Songs

Translating the Boundary between Life and Death in O’odham Devil Songs David L. Kozak with David I. Lopez I do not think it a stretch to say that translating Native verbal arts occupies an unseen boundary with its comings and goings between what is actually said, what is interpreted, then invented out of those words, and the written text that is presented as a faithful rendition of what was originally stated or sung. And while translation is of course reliant upon getting the words straight, I think the heart of translation is centrally about re-expressing the rhythms and movements expressed by those words. As we are all very much aware, words have the ability to move us. And it makes no difference what language we speak, since every language possesses genres intended to emotionally move its speakers. This is, I think, a fine way to define the “art” in the verbal art found in Native American oral traditions. Ideally, the translator’s task is as much about technical accuracy as it is about the art. Realistically, however, a translation is tipped to one or another side of the technical-aesthetic continuum. In this chapter I am particularly interested in identifying and translating the art of Native American oral traditions. Tohono O’odham shamanism traverses an imagistic boundary between the empirical and sentient world, called kawk jewed ‘hard earth,’ and the afterlife and flowery world, called si’alig weco ‘below the eastern horizon.’ This tradition’s healing music articulates this boundary in both diagnostic (duajida) and healing (wusota) song-poems. The songs are of a dreamt liminality encouraging the hearer to contemplate the order of society, the beauties of nature, and the seductions of the spirit world. Central to this 275 poetics are lyrically inspired images that collapse the distance between life and death, between human and non-human, that blur the distinction between past and present, fuse self with other, and represent the boundary in song as a shifting cosmological and geographical space of interaction between those living humans who inhabit the earth and non-living spirit entities. It is a spatial-mood-poesis that shares attributes with other Uto-Aztecan languages in the Southwest and beyond. The hypothesized spatial-mood-poesis I consider in this chapter differs from yet is related to the chromaticism identified in the role of flowers and other dazzling imagery so well described by Jane Hill in her essay “The Flower World of Old Uto-Aztecan” (1992). In it she identified the pervasiveness of nouns in Uto-Aztecan verbal arts that emphasize the symbolism associated with flowers, bright colors, landscapes, and shimmering phenomena in its link to the afterlife destination. The boundary metaphor and symbolism found in song I propose here focuses on the fluidity of movement to pregnant stillness (itself a category of movement), geographical distance and the songs’ hero’s return to the living world. It is an emphasis on verbs of motion , whereas Hill paid close attention to descriptive nouns. It is a lyrical signature that emphasizes the life and movement side of the boundary, whereas the dazzling and flowery world emphasizes a description of the afterlife. It is a difference between action and image. In sum, the flower/ chromatic symbolism refers to a well-defined and normative location in O’odham philosophy, whereas the boundary spatial-mood-poesis refers to a negotiable and shifting cognitive space. Whereas the chromatic symbolism is ever-present in Tohono O’odham song-poetry of the afterlife location, only a small percentage of this songpoetry speaks of traversing the boundary between life and death. It is an understated poetic language of personal transformation and inner turmoil . The passage from life to death and back again is symbolized lyrically as a border crossing that is densely meaningful. Such songs are an understatement , a calm or muffled expression of the calamity of death. This border crossing is a thematic or mood marker that functions as a signature element in song much in the way that the much more common imagery of frenetic motion, dizziness, bright colors, or flowers are a mood marker found in O’odham song-poetry. I call this signature a spatial-mood-poesis that is at times metaphorized by physical geography as expressed in expansive distance and often with an accompanying cessation (if momentary ) of motion. It is a contemplative stillness of the song’s hero. 276 Kozak and Lopez Song...