Hacha: On Translation & Ignorance

Reading Hacha, I had the experience of feeling both like a student learning about a culture I knew nothing about inside and like somebody perpetually and irrevocably on the outside. The oscillation between the two - poetry as educational opportunity and poetry as simulation of foreignness -- seems vital to Perez's approach to writing Hacha. 

I'm fascinated by how Perez makes his decisions about what and when and how to translate Chamorro words. For the most part Perez translates Chamorro at the end of the poem, after we've already encountered the word in its foreignness. For example:

from tidelands

taut

"shadows almond" visible be-

              low the dispersal of "forms--swathe" this

      small touch "no maps sown" to hallow

     [tano]

    hold "alms that shell" this pulse

 

                            ~

                 [tano: land, soil, earth, ground]

Before we learn what "tano" means, we are left to contemplate its meaning. How it hovers, suspended with so much space above and below. Hallowed and holding. Only at the very end of the page, we learn the many meanings for tano and then have the opportunity to read the poem again and consider it differently.

Most of the tidelands poems follow suit, providing definitions at the very bottom of the page. However, the aerial roots poems approach definitions differently, bolding the Chamorro words and offering what appear at first to be definitions/translations. We soon realize, though, these are not easy translations. The Chamorro words prompt images and mythologies and poetry. For example:

[ sintura : the first horse arriving with iron

           in its mouth---dust towering narrow

                             seaboard floods

          once unreachable villages---you tend dreams

of possession      [ apuya': a prayer basket

                           woven from hair suspends all theorems

          of movement---winds

thieve salt and flower the opened hull---you locate...

It's important to note that the brackets are never closed in these aerial roots poems. They only make way for more bracketing, more holding, more dreaming. Perez seems to be suggesting that the meanings of these words cannot be contained.

Lastly, I thought it was so interesting that Perez provides "a list of references to navigate this poem" after we've already read Stations of Crossing. Reading the poem without this navigation, I had the sense of feeling like such an outsider and stranger to the events being described. I felt the weight of my own ignorance. As an American, how could I know absolutely nothing about Guam and its repeated history of colonization? Especially since it continues to this day? Reading the references, I learned so much from the list alone and felt energized to return to the poems, now with an ability to map more meaning onto them. 

Hacha works in this dual sense - as both an opportunity to educate an audience of readers who Perez realizes will know very little about the place & history his work draws from, and also an opportunity to simulate the experience of strangeness, evoking visceral discomfort as they become painfully aware of their own outsider-ness.