If I embody the story, its spirit envelopes me

Okay

go ahead

laugh if you want to

but as I tell the story

it will begin to happen.

-Voice of the witch from an untitled

poem in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller

Of all the definitions, explications, and demonstrations of the translating process that we have reviewed so far this semester, none come as close to my idea of true translation than do the works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Jerome Rothenberg. Rather than trying to convert and/or displace original stories and poems through a conventionally formulaic act of translation, both Leslie Marmon Silko and Jerome Rothenberg enter themselves, exuberantly and fully, into the spirit and character of the works that they mean to honor, rejuvenate, and, in Rothenberg’s case, use for inspiration. When the quality of human particularity is embraced in the original story, poem, or song and capitalized on by its translator(s), the aim of objective accuracy in translation is subsumed by the “total” purpose of discovering humanity’s “psychic and biological unity.”

In Storyteller,Leslie Marmon Silko re-creates the stories and poems of her Native American roots by recalling and presenting narratives that were told to her during her upbringing on the Laguna Pueblo, 50 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jerome Rothenberg, on the other hand, reports himself to be unfamiliar with both the Navajo and Seneca languages, yet, having lived with the Senecas, claims to be familiar with the culture, as well as with the collective character, of this tribe. His poetic mission is analogous to that of Silko in that he aims “to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present.”

As Silko and Rothenberg share a similar artistic attitude and purpose, it is not surprising that the poets’ methods and creations are likewise comparable. As our class has seen and discussed this semester, the most characteristic features of oral (“tribal”) poetry include the ever-present context of the performed poem/song/story, the corporeal quality of both the poet who embodies narrative characters and the audience in whom physical responses to these poems are to be evoked, and, of course, the living memory, which both inspires and depends upon embodied, contextualized poems and their continual re-tellings. The living, collective memory, complete with particularity of context and corporeality, is both passively honored and actively applied through the act of re-performing lived story-events via the re-embodying of these stories’ characters.

For Leslie Marmon Silko, the tradition of using the embodied presentation to preserve oral stories, poems, and songs is a necessary part of her heritage and culture. In Storyteller, Silko reports that, when telling the story of the girl who ran away, her Aunt Susie would relay the tale “with great tenderness, with great feeling as if Aunt Susie herself were the mother addressing her little child”(15). To endow this story with resonance (i.e., to keep it memorable), Aunt Susie would also use varying facial expressions, gestures, and vocal tones to convey the emotions of mournfulness, excitement, and wonder. Similarly, Silko reports that her Grandma A’mooh, while reading a selection from her collected book of stories, “always read the story with such animation and expression changing her tone of voice and inflection each time one of the bears spoke – the way a storyteller would have told it”(93).

In Jerome Rothenberg’s case, embodiment of presentation is revealed not only in the works that he translates, but also in his means of translating them. In his Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian Poetry, Rothenberg reports that he discovered a means of “totally” translating Navajo vocables when he “began to speak, then sing [his] own words over [the original recording], replacing…vocables with sounds relevant to [him], then putting [his] own version on a fresh tape”(87). The sounds and melody of Rothenberg’s translated recording did not mimic the those of the original (in fact, Rothenberg considers the duplication of original poems to be dangerous); rather than infringing or imposing upon the original, Rothernberg brought himself (i.e., his own language, voice, and particular nature) into the heart of a foreign poem and then wiggled his way out of it, through its unfamiliar physical sounds and particular dimensions of circumstance, back into a relevant and familiar domain.

In different ways and on different creative levels, Silko and Rothenberg make use of the physicality of motion and emotion and the transient, yet memorable, nature of context. These poets share the crucial understanding that translation of any kind requires a total investment, genealogical or artistic, on the part of the translator. By uniting him or herself with the original poem, song, or story (and, thus, taking on its original character), the translator will, in turn, be able to infuse the original spirit of the poem/song/story into any kind of translation.