
A eulogy and a battle cry for endangered languages everywhere

An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages. Edited by Chris McCabe. Chambers, 2019. Hardback, $21.98. 336 pages.
An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages. Edited by Chris McCabe. Chambers, 2019. Hardback, $21.98. 336 pages.
Other poems take on language itself. “My grandmother never learned Spanish/ was afraid of forgetting her gods,” Mikeas Sanchez describes in Zoque, an indigenous language of Mexico. The English translation of the poem includes curses her grandmother would shout in Zoque — Sanchez describes them as prayers that go unanswered.
Translation is given an honored front seat in the anthology, the painstaking effort of preserving meaning and style described in detail by editor Chris McCabe. Individual translators retain the copyrights of their translations.
Translation crosses into the subject matter itself. “Tonight, my friends, there will be no translations, nothing trans-lated, altered, diluted with hub-bubbly English that turns my ferment of poems/ to lemonade,” writes Gearóid Mac Lochlainn in Irish Gaelic. The lines, ironically or not, are later translated into English by the author himself and Frankie Sewell in “Translations.”

From “Nomad Testament” by the writer Hawad, in Tamajaght, a Berber dialect of the central Sahara. The alphabet is Tifinagh.
The book features poets like Sanchez, Mac Lochlainn and Lewis who have won national fame, and lesser-known writers such as Henrique Miguel Rodrigues, the youngest speaker of the nearly-extinct Patua, a creole spoken in Macau. Some poems are historic: Taniel Varoujan, a poet killed in the Armenian genocide, is featured in his original Armenian writing “to the starving people” in an excerpt from a book of his poetry published in 1909. All of the languages themselves are highly historic, offering snapshots into the words of centuries past — Assyrian, Hawaiian, Navajo.

The poem “Inuit,” written in Inuktitut by Norma Dunning, begins “Inuit breathe in two worlds. Past and Present.”
Only one poem is not translated. “Fiere Love Poem,” written by Jackie Kay in Scots, is intelligible to readers of English, especially if read aloud. “The nicht I kent oor love/ wad go on and on, darlin, the clouds mirrored the moth/ we fund in the fields.” If you didn’t get that at first try, the translation would be “the night I knew our love would go on and on, darling, the clouds mirrored the moth we found the fields.” McCabe explains that “Fiere” means “companion” in Scots; the poem is pulled from a published collection by Kay.
All in all, the anthology is a good read, both from a literary and linguistic perspective, simultaneously tragic and hopeful. It is a collection of words from waning cultures, from tribes with centuries of battle scars — from defiant lips preserving the old ways.