The Mouse That Sucked: On "Translating" a Navajo Poem

Single Algonkin words are like tiny imagist poems.

Edward Sapir, Language

In the final chapter of his 1921 classic book Language, Edward Sapir makes the oft-quoted statement that serves as my epigraph. Earlier in that same chapter on language and literature, Sapir offered what I take to be a caution to erstwhile translators: "Every language is itself a collective art of expression. There is concealed in it a particular set of esthetic factors—phonetic, rhythmic, symbolic, morphological—which it does not share with any other language" (225). I take this as a caution because it implies a degree of incommensurability between languages, a position Sapir also advocated.¹ More generally, Sapir's caution seems to focus our attention on what Paul Friedrich has termed "poetic indeterminacy." And Friedrich wishes to call our attention to the importance of poetic language, which he argues "is the locus of the most interesting differences between languages and should be the focus of the study of such differences" (17). This article is a brief foray into such terrain.

In this article, I present a short poem in Navajo by the Navajo poet Rex Lee Jim and an English translation that I did in consultation with Jim. The purpose is to explore the difficulties of translation, on precisely the grounds that Sapir enumerated above (e.g., phonetic, rhythmic, symbolic, morphological). I present the Navajo poem together with my English translation. My subsequent analysis of this translation enables me to demonstrate the problems involved in translating from Navajo to English. The poem is deeply embedded within Navajo semantics, sound symbolism, and phonology, and as such it offers an extreme example of the inherent incommensurability one encounters when attempting to translate across disparate languages. I then conclude by returning to issues raised throughout this article, namely, that the process of translation needs to be complimented by the use of exegesis (or critical analysis, by way of linguistic and ethnographic background knowledge). Ethnographic and linguistic knowledge are crucial components of any translation project. Ultimately, though, even with such background knowledge, when one approaches poems that are based on the poetic potentials of a specific language, such as the one I will analyze below, something will, by default, be lost in any translation. This article is, then, also a cautionary tale.

The Poems

The poem to be presented is from Jim's Navajo language collection of poems titled saad, which glosses as "word, language."² The book is from the Princeton Collections of Western Americana, and the author is listed as Mazii Dinéltsoi. The book is especially interesting because it is written entirely in Navajo, including its page numbers. Thus the poem to be discussed appears on page tádiin dóó bi'ąą tsosts'id or roughly page 37.³

Jim has published two other books of Navajo poetry: Áhí Ni Nikisheegiizh, also published by Princeton Collections of Western Americana, and Dúchas Táá Kóó Diné, a trilingual book of poetry in English, Irish, and Navajo. The difference between saad and the other two books is apparent even to a non-Navajo reader. The poems in saad are short, haiku-like poems, whereas the poems in the other two books are longer and more narrative in quality. The poems in saad seem to take a certain pleasure in their brevity, their quickness.⁴

I want to pause here and make clear that I have provided an English translation and not the English translation. I follow Ofelia Zepeda and suggest that translations are approximations of the feelingful quality, the emotive force, the sparseness, the quickness of the Navajo (or Tohono O'odham) source language original. The following translation is similar to the versions one finds in Jim's trilingual collection, where poems in English and Navajo may differ quite a bit. Other translations may be created to highlight other features of the poem...