Metaphors in the Space Between

Natalia Toledo writes poetry in Isthmus Zapotec, a language spoken in Mexico’s Oaxacan Peninsula that belongs to the Otomanguean family. She has published five volumes of bilingual poetry (Zapotec-Spanish), and her verses have been translated into languages as varied as German, Slovenian, and Chinese. Like many poets who write in the indigenous languages of Mexico, she translates her own writing into Spanish. The vast majority of indigenous poets are their own translators because no professional cohort exists to provide such services. Mexico in particular, with more than sixty languages, each with its own variants, has no infrastructure to translate texts for educational or artistic purposes. Thus, poets who write in originary languages must often translate themselves if they want to be read beyond their own language. Toledo has sometimes created the Spanish text first or even written both at the same time. (When translating into Spanish, she often replaces Zapotec words with Nahuatl because this language, with many more speakers, has permeated Mexican Spanish.) This creation process undermines fixed notions of an original text, because the poems are in flux as the author works back and forth between Zapotec and Spanish. In her book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, Karen Emmerich explains that, given the many iterations any work undergoes via edition and translation, there really is no such thing as an original text. She proposes that we “replace an outdated understanding of translation as a transfer or transmission of some semantic invariant with a more reasonable understanding of translation as a further textual extension of an already unstable literary work.” In this way, she frees translation from the limiting idea of one text/ one author/one translator and recognizes the process of creation and recreation that actually takes place. Working with the bilingual poetry of Natalia Toledo provides an example of this dynamic and varied process.