Translating Tedlock

I found Dennis Tedlock’s “Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability” to be fascinating, yet I wonder what others think about how (i.e., from what perspective) Tedlock views the major poetic strategies of the Maya. Tedlock asserts that Mayan poetry seeks to sustain the incompleteness of objects by “raising the discontinuity of the ‘presence of the same object’ to a high frequency.” He notes that the Mayans’ long lists, which omit certain items, endeavor to “[resist] totalization.” Furthermore, Tedlock states that, in placing epithets and nicknames alongside proper names, the Maya wish to shatter the notion of selfhood as consistent and unified. For us, as a literate culture, these poetic effects are well received. As a culture that seeks (and often believes to find) meaning and truth on the written page, we share a proclivity to seek total conclusivity of all things, concepts, and people. Thus, it is with open arms that we receive the Mayans’ poetic evocations of discontinuity, incompleteness, and differentiation. On the other hand, as a culture that regards objects, ideas, and selfhoods as fragments contributing to an overarching and ongoing narrative, the Mayan people, it seems, do not require the same poetic effects as do we. Is Tedlock tacitly presenting oral cultures to be one step beyond literate societies or is he isolating Mayan poetic effects upon a literate audience, regardless of what these poems’ intentions and strategies mean/are to the Mayan people?

On a separate note, I appreciate Tedlock’s mentioning that, for oral cultures, such as the Zuni and the Maya, paraphrase is not heresy and translation is not treacherous. Says Tedlock, “Translation is a continuation of a process already under way in the poem itself” and, thus, it is accepted, even encouraged, between and WITHIN cultures, poets, and even poems themselves. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller, for example, the stories entitled “Cottonwood: Part Two: Buffalo Story”(page 67) and “Storytelling”(page 94) contain the same conceptual nexus (i.e., the capturing of Yellow Woman by Buffalo Man), yet the narrative perspectives, tones, emphases, details, and conclusions of these versions vary significantly. The first version, told from the third person perspective, adeptly merges realistic, historical, and utilitarian features of storytelling with supernatural, fictive, and entertaining ones, thereby producing a captivating tale that smacks of mythological folklore. The second version of the story, on the other hand, compresses a skeletal version of the first story into a few stanzas, devotes the middle section to a 1967 news report concerning the kidnapping of four Laguna women, and then moves from the third to the first person perspective, as the narrator identifies herself with Yellow Woman. What the reader/auditor gleans from recursive (“doubling back”) narratives with different deliveries and foci is a pluralized appreciation of the poems’ fundamentally plural (i.e., versatile) narrative idea/spirit. In the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as so appropriately quoted by Tedlock, “The successive impressions of discourse, which strike a redoubled blow, produce a different feeling from that of the continuous presence of the same object, which can be taken in at a single glance."