Looks pretty enough, doesn't it? This is where I'll be going to school next year.
http://www.colby.edu/
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Off to the Maine Wilderness
Looks pretty enough, doesn't it? This is where I'll be going to school next year.
http://www.colby.edu/
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Variations to "Flight of the Quetzalcoatl"
Variations to "Flight of the Quetzalcoatl"
His body coiled burning on the water
His arms annoyed and prodded
He who they wasted with their drink
*
And he remembered the celibate priestess
This face and his reflected in the water
*
In the morning
This beating memory
---
This poem fragment was a little bit inspired by the work of Armand Schwerner. He wrote made up "reconstructions" of Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions that he called tablets. Now my technique is hardly similar but the idea behind this poem is. I took inspiration from an ethnopoetic translation and created something new out of it. The result is something that is inspired and informed by indigenous culture but new, filtered through the influence of our own culture. I believe that the original poem was based on a myth in which Quetzalcoatal sleeps with a celibate priestess after becoming drunk and then burns himself in remorse at which point his heart becomes the morning star, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. The original translator of this poem actually happens to be Ángel María Garibay Kintana as well but the version I read was by Jerome Rothenberg.
Source poem: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/poems/quetzal.pdf
His body coiled burning on the water
whose remorse cut a sort of drunk “s” a highway in the dirt from Tula
whose wisdom became ash leeched out among the young roots
whose old silver greyed and crusted over and his papers coiled and turned in on themselves
His arms annoyed and prodded
by the greasy fingers of old shamans
He who they wasted with their drink
*
And he remembered the celibate priestess
her eyes cloudy turned away and bored and unresponsive
This face and his reflected in the water
in a long cursive “s” of vapor as he boiled
*
In the morning
his heart suspended in the clouds the horizon dull black with the loss of his human body and human thoughts and wisdom
his body into vapor
This beating memory
flicker
morning star
---
This poem fragment was a little bit inspired by the work of Armand Schwerner. He wrote made up "reconstructions" of Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions that he called tablets. Now my technique is hardly similar but the idea behind this poem is. I took inspiration from an ethnopoetic translation and created something new out of it. The result is something that is inspired and informed by indigenous culture but new, filtered through the influence of our own culture. I believe that the original poem was based on a myth in which Quetzalcoatal sleeps with a celibate priestess after becoming drunk and then burns himself in remorse at which point his heart becomes the morning star, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. The original translator of this poem actually happens to be Ángel María Garibay Kintana as well but the version I read was by Jerome Rothenberg.
Source poem: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/poems/quetzal.pdf
A Translation
Poema de la Conquista
Con suerte lamentosa nos vimos angustiados.
En los caminos yacen dardos rotos:
los cabellos están esparcidos.
Destechadas están las casas,
enrojecidos tienen sus muros.
Gusanos pululan por calles y plazas,
y están las paredes manchadas de sesos.
Rojas están las aguas, cual si las hubieran teñido,
y si las bebíamos, eran agua de salitre.
Golpeábamos los muros de adobe en nuestra ansiedad
y nos quedaba por herencia una red de agujeros.
En los escudos estuvo nuestro resguardo,
pero los escudos no detienen la desolación.
Hemos comido panes de colorín
hemos masticado grama salitrosa,
pedazos de adobe, lagartijas, ratones
y tierra hecha polvo y aun los gusanos...
Poem of the Conquest
With sad luck we saw ourselves tormented.
Broken arrows lie in the streets,
the hair is scattered.
The houses are unroofed,
their walls are reddened.
Worms writhe in the streets and plazas,
the walls are painted with brains.
The waters are dyed red and if we drank them,
they were waters of niter.
We punched the adobe walls in our anxiety,
we left a network of holes as an inheritance.
We defended ourselves with shields,
but the shields couldn't stop our desolation.
We have eaten brightly colored breads,
we have chewed salty grass,
---
This is a translation of a translation. And this seems to be a common theme in ethnopoetics. The original version was translated from a 1528 Nahuatl manuscript by Ángel María Garibay Kintana. Ethnopoetics is all about finding connections and taking from other cultures to broaden our own perspective. And so that is what I tried to do here. I brought this obscure record of indigenous art into our culture and have made it accessible to you. I tried to preserve the meaning more completely by altering the language where it was necessary into modern terms that would be more comprehensible. I broke up the lines to highlight meaning and changed language to maintain the parallelism that I can tell through the translation was a feature of the original. I hope that my translation is enlightening to you, that it communicates the brutality of the Spanish conquests as told by the people who experienced them.
BTW I can't really be sure of the credibility of the website I took this Spanish version from.
Source: http://www.toltecayotl.org/tolteca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=604:poesia-nahuatl-angel-maria-garibay-kintana&catid=26:general&Itemid=74
Con suerte lamentosa nos vimos angustiados.
En los caminos yacen dardos rotos:
los cabellos están esparcidos.
Destechadas están las casas,
enrojecidos tienen sus muros.
Gusanos pululan por calles y plazas,
y están las paredes manchadas de sesos.
Rojas están las aguas, cual si las hubieran teñido,
y si las bebíamos, eran agua de salitre.
Golpeábamos los muros de adobe en nuestra ansiedad
y nos quedaba por herencia una red de agujeros.
En los escudos estuvo nuestro resguardo,
pero los escudos no detienen la desolación.
Hemos comido panes de colorín
hemos masticado grama salitrosa,
pedazos de adobe, lagartijas, ratones
y tierra hecha polvo y aun los gusanos...
Poem of the Conquest
With sad luck we saw ourselves tormented.
Broken arrows lie in the streets,
the hair is scattered.
The houses are unroofed,
their walls are reddened.
Worms writhe in the streets and plazas,
the walls are painted with brains.
The waters are dyed red and if we drank them,
they were waters of niter.
We punched the adobe walls in our anxiety,
we left a network of holes as an inheritance.
We defended ourselves with shields,
but the shields couldn't stop our desolation.
We have eaten brightly colored breads,
we have chewed salty grass,
pieces of adobe,
little lizards, mice,
dirt turned into dust, worms...
---
This is a translation of a translation. And this seems to be a common theme in ethnopoetics. The original version was translated from a 1528 Nahuatl manuscript by Ángel María Garibay Kintana. Ethnopoetics is all about finding connections and taking from other cultures to broaden our own perspective. And so that is what I tried to do here. I brought this obscure record of indigenous art into our culture and have made it accessible to you. I tried to preserve the meaning more completely by altering the language where it was necessary into modern terms that would be more comprehensible. I broke up the lines to highlight meaning and changed language to maintain the parallelism that I can tell through the translation was a feature of the original. I hope that my translation is enlightening to you, that it communicates the brutality of the Spanish conquests as told by the people who experienced them.
BTW I can't really be sure of the credibility of the website I took this Spanish version from.
Source: http://www.toltecayotl.org/tolteca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=604:poesia-nahuatl-angel-maria-garibay-kintana&catid=26:general&Itemid=74
Monday, June 1, 2009
Tuvan Throat Singing
How does one go about explicating a song in another language from a part of the world most people in the United States wouldn’t even know exists? I wouldn’t know Tuva existed either had it not been for these YouTube videos. And as one watches this video it is immediately apparent that one is dealing with something that is millions of years and miles from our culture. But then again, ethnopoetics is about finding connections between distant social groups. It kind of necessitates going beyond our cultural comfort zone. We know that we can never wholly understand these foreign works of art but must be confident that we are not simply exploiting the cultures that created them.
Wikipedia tells me that Tuvan throat singing is related to the indigenous animism of the region. That is, their indigenous religion is centered around the belief that non-human objects, organisms, and forces have souls. In this belief system, humans are on a more-or-less equal footing with their natural surroundings and desire some form of unity with them. This is reflected in their throat singing. Wikipedia also tells me that the sounds in this style of music are made to mimic natural sounds. There is a long list of specific styles of throat singing and the natural sounds they correspond to but I won’t rely on it.
Let me start with the instrumentation. On this banjo-like little instrument the singer to the right repeats one “riff” throughout the song. The sound is clunky and choppy. It relies mostly on a straight thumping rhythm. However, the instrumentalist also plays trilled triplets that remind me of walking. The melody is melancholy in an obvious minor key. All of this, I think, suggests either a mood of tireless journeying or working.
Moving on. At first the singer on the right sings in a harsh sort of strained voice. This agrees with the mood of tireless journeying/working I mentioned earlier. Or it might possibly reflect the harshness of their surroundings during the winter. The singer on the left comes in with a deep, buzzing drone. It is almost overpowering. This kind of drone is ubiquitous in spiritual music – it is the same kind of drone one might hear in the playing of the Scottish bagpipe, Indian sitar, or Australian didgeridoo. It is representative of the overwhelming power of nature as well as a sort of unity between man and nature. In this particular instance the singer’s drone reminds me of fierce winter winds or thunderous crashing water (another possible link to the theme of the harshness of winter). But then the singer on the right comes in with a sung melody that sounds like a whistle. It is sometimes faint but manages to sing through the other singer’s roaring drone. And it immediately reminds one of bird singing. Furthermore, in contrast to the rest of the song it is happy sounding, in a major key. Imagine hearing a bird singing through the roaring sound of a waterfall in winter. This juxtaposition suggests the capability of humble living things to persevere and succeed through the overpowering forces that surround them.
One must also keep in mind that, as this is a video, the filmmaker is trying to make a point in the video as well. Look at the icy water flowing just behind the singers. And then the people ice fishing in front of an industrial background of power lines and buildings. This reinforces my theme as well as providing an extension of it: the will of indigenous peoples to survive in a suddenly new modern world.
This video is clearly ethnographic. The filmmaker brings an obscure cultural phenomenon to the attention of a wider audience. He allows the culture to represent itself and stays faithful to the style of music in its most authentic form. However, he also injects his own, foreign perspective in the staging of the video as well as providing context for the music by identifying the place and culture that created it.
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