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language: Zoque (Spanish tr. Mikeas Sánchez; English tr. Wendy Call and Shook)
country: Mexico
year: 2023
form: poetry
dates read: 23.2.26
Mikeas Sánchez’s How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems (tr. Wendy Call and Shook primarily from Sánchez’s Spanish translations) is a trilingual (Chiapas Zoque-Spanish-English) collection of poetry spanning more than a decade of Sánchez’s career.
as Call and Shook observe in their translator’s note, there are some clear developments over this span: the early poems in the collection are mainly long poems in a more mythic register:
Tese’ nukpa jyama
wäkä wyanh’nhtyotza te’ jome’ nisujopyapä’
yäti’ maka’ nyiäj’maya’e yatz’pät
yäti’ maka’ nyiäj’maya’e nhtzuj’kopya’
Mama’ Karmen pyopo’asa’jinh
mitum tzujsnu’pajk’omopä
jäyä’mayu’jinh’tam
Pyokpatzyuwe
watum’ myapasyi’omo
ejtzum kyojama’jinh
Yäti’ maka’ yispäki te’ peka’tzame
yäti’ maka’ myapa’syiäyi te’ tzama’komi
yäti’ maka’ ’yise wynäjpajk anhsänh’yomo kowinas’nyi’e//
Así de pronto llega el día
y el curandero debe cantar con su voz de pulsador
ahora será el nigromante
ahora lo llamarán hechicero
La Virgen del Carmen vestida de blanco
ha salido del Tzujsnu’pajk
con un ramillete de flores de mayo
Pyokpatzyuwe
ha cantado en el centro de su sueño
ha bailado con su nagual
Ahora conocerá la palabra antigua
ahora soñará con el dueño del monte
ahora mirará de frente a la señora del tiempo//
So quickly comes the day
and the curandero must sing with his healer’s voice
now he’ll be the necromancer
now they’ll call him conjurer
The Virgin of Carmen dressed in white
has given mountain guardian Tzujsnu’pajk
a bouquet of mayflowers
Pyokpatzyuwe
has sung in his dreams
has danced with his nagual
Now he will learn the ancient word
now he will dream of the mountain guardian
now he will face the goddess of time
(“Wejpäj’ki’uy / Nombrar las cosas / To name things”, part 8)
following these, there’s a selection of shorter poems, including poems Sánchez wrote while she was studying in Spain, reflecting on European xenophobia and racism against African immigrants. Sánchez apparently calls these her “non-Indigenous poems”, in light of a literary climate where “only writing about certain themes was considered Indigenous literature”.
following these, the poems return to Zoque land, culture, and traditions, drawing on imagery from Zoque religion and folklore but retaining the strong political throughline, highlighting Indigenous alienation in contemporary Mexico, particularly in urban spaces, and challenging both the material violence of resource extraction and the symbolic violence of discourses of Indigenous death / “extinction”.
I enjoyed the collection! while I would have preferred either a complete works or a full translation of one or more of Sánchez’s individual Zoque-Spanish collections, I think the selection of poems here was quite good. How to Be a Good Savage both feels like a cohesive collection and does a good job showcasing Sánchez’s changing aesthetic and political attitudes as a poet. Call and Shook have included a handful of endnotes, partly I think on the basis of the footnotes that apparently accompanied Sánchez’s Zoque-Spanish collections, and I think the decision to move them to the end was a good one: they’re there for readers who want them, but they’re not weighing the poems down with ethnographic detail.
reading both the Spanish translations (by Sánchez) and the English ones there are some interesting differences; while Call and Shook were working mainly from the Spanish, they apparently did consult extensively with Sánchez during the process, including going through the Zoque texts of all the poems to identify places where the Zoque and Spanish differed, find out why Sánchez made the choices she did, and decide what would be the best approach for the English. this sounds like it must have been quite a lot of work for all parties, but I think it really paid off. one result is that reading both translations side by side helps de-authorize Sánchez’s Spanish versions, reminding us that they’re one interpretation but not necessarily the only one even in Spanish. we can note in the title poem, for example, that Call and Shook have reinserted “the Nhkirawa” (i.e., foreigners) that Sánchez opted to omit in the Spanish:
Te’ sutu’ wäpä’ tzamapänh’ajä,
myuspäjku jujtzyi’e yajk’ yosa’ te’ käjtz’täjkuy’,
teserike’ nhkyenh’tuyu’ te’ nhkyrawa’is’nyi’o’a’ram.//
Pero él quiso ser un buen salvaje,
aprendió a usar la cuchara,
y admiró la electricidad.//
But he wanted to be a good savage,
learned to eat with a spoon,
and the Nhkirawa’s electric lamps impressed him.
I suspect that at least in part Sánchez may have conceived of her Spanish translations as a way to make the poems accessible to other Zoque people who weren’t necessarily literate in their language, as it occasionally omits more specific Zoque terms (presumably because they would be unnecessary) whereas Call and Shook obviously are working for an almost certainly non-Zoque audience and so are foregrounding Zoque slightly more.
the result is a wide-ranging collection that remains grounded in Zoque land and culture but also looks outward and invites others in — even, explicitly in one case, white readers. if you like poetry, I think it’s definitely worth a look.
moods: hopeful, polemic, reflective