Wow.
Yá'át'ééh.
[SPEAKING DINÉ]
So good to meet you.
Good to meet everybody here.
And I will just go ahead and go into the translations.
They were very, very interesting.
It was a great pleasure.
Thank you to the Poetry Center, to Gail, to Renee,
and to the whole Poetry Center family.
It's good to see familiar faces in the audience,
faces I haven't seen in a while.
And it's a pleasure to read from my own language,
the language of my family.
And it was a challenge to translate into Navajo, for me,
and it was a growing experience.
Something I will continue after this whole process,
but it was also a collaborative exercise because I also
called home a lot to my mom and
[LAUGHTER]
my dad.
You know?
As he's hammering-- my dad's a carpenter.
So he'd be hammering away, and then he'd
pull away from his job just to help me on a translation.
Or, how do you say this?
Then my mom, she works at a senior center in White Cone,
and she was--
Natalia sent a poem, and it's kind of cheeky.
And it has this image of skeletons and these men
who swing their balls over the edge--
the something fear, the heads of fear.
[LAUGHTER]
So I was, like, OK, she's talking about balls,
like in balls?
Or something like balls.
[LAUGHTER]
So my mom's like, what does she mean?
[LAUGHTER]
Is she saying-- is she thinking what I'm thinking?
I was like, ah, yeah.
Then, we're trying to tell, like, is it "yęęzhi"
or what do they say?
But I use that word here.
"Earth."
This is a translation of my own poem from Shapeshift.
Amá yaa nitséskees: Ałtse’ ałghaadiit’aash aado hazhóó’ógo yiit’ash doo.
“T’áá’ádzaagóósh yaadeeltí ahił hwilne’ó?” nihiłné.
Aadóó nihigi’deezį́į́’ígó `ahóót’įįd, `i`ii`ą́ hayííłką́
t’áá `ał sto’ bita’ doo yá’á’hót’ééh da, abíní biwoo’naaniigá’
jį́į́go łeezh bee hahalkaadi doo deení’igíí bik’i’dindíín łéh,
t’áá `ałtso
tó áłch’į́į́dígó nilǫ́ǫ́ yits’ą́ą́doo’ kǫ` hadéézką́’.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm looking at Luci for--
[LAUGHTER]
She's like, uh, maybe.
A little-- and the poem is "Nahasdzáán."
And it was just a partial translation
because it was just very enlightening.
And I just kept hitting these silent spaces
between languages.
And I didn't want to run with my own interpretation,
but I really wanted to kind of keep to the translation
as I knew it.
But it required so much more.
"Nahasdzáán."
"Mother thought-- first we will run, then we will walk.
She asked, 'Do we ramble when we speak in tongues?'
Her lack of supervision made this happen.
The dusk, the dawn, everything in between-- a mistake.
The morning, her aching tooth, the shovel dulled in daylight--
all digging fire from shallowing waters.
Her plan-- one big mistake.
In this language, she wasn't asked
to sing because in this room, there was never a light switch
never a search for memory.
The memory of onyx collected against a rib.
The origin-- iiná.