Guest post by Nathalie Bléser, part one in a series of 5
I recently put out a call for submissions to our website, and Nathalie Bléser quickly volunteered. I used to host regular drop-in writing session called Monday Writers and Nathalie attended on occasion, a delightful addition to our group. ~Jennifer Simpson
“From
the Moon Navel came Malina, Mi Luz y Mi
Luna”.
A Tribute to the Beautiful
Sessions of Monday Writers
~ Nathalie Bléser ~
Esta pieza iniciada bajo la luna llena del equinoccio de primavera
va dedicada a tod@s mis amig@s escritore/as chican@s,
vivit@s y muertit@s, y en particular a Rudy Anaya, Tino Villanueva, Lucha Corpi, Alejandro Morales y Miguel Méndez
Plume honored me with a beautiful offer: being a guest writer for their blog. The day I was given their green light was exciting, and I went to bed wondering what topic I would choose, or what topic would choose me… The next morning I woke up very early, singing Au Clair de la Lune to my cat Caramel. My fur lady half opened one of her sleepy eyes from our cozy cuddling bliss. She wondered why on earth I would wake her up before dawn only to lull her back into sleep with an old French folk song!
“One of her backward thingies,” she thought and sighed and closed her eye back. Still, she purred a polite approval of her weird hu-mom’s ways.
Sí, soy rara, y a mucha honra ~yes, I am weird and proud to be called so~. Take it or leave it, this is how and who I am. Some may think it’s strange, but for me it is vital to follow my dreams and ask them where they want to take me. So once Caramel fell back into her second sleep, I got up, and then hummed and sang and sang and hummed Au Clair de la Lune until the notes and lyrics shone a light through my virtual plume. My expression for Plume would start with images for the morning song.
I am very visual, and images are often my first building material when I produce a new written piece. Often, the piece will take time, sometimes a very long time until all the dots have been structured in my mind to form a skeleton ready to be wrapped in the skin of words. The crafting of this particular piece asked me to start making something meant to be both an illustration of the song gifted to me at dawn and a tribute to the name of the literary adventure undertaken by my virtual hostesses, Melanie and Jennifer. Although the song revolves around the word Plume, this very word is the product of a deformation, a switch the French language owes to the desuetude of a word that lost its meaning. “Lume” was the original word, an old way to say light, “lumière”. The new word has inundated the language so vastly that it ended up drowning its ancestor in blinding luminosity. In the song, light became “plume”, a feather or a quill, basically because “plume” kind of rhymes with “lune” (moon), like “lume” kind of rhymed with “lune”, the MooN, our night luminaria. Don’t you think it’s amazing that the first and last letters of Moon are also the only letters that distinguish “luNe” from “luMe”, the moon from its ancestral light? They also spell the initials of New Mexico… (Welcome to the labyrinthine paths of my visual and auditory mind!)
In French words have genders; “sun” is masculine, but “light” and “moon” are feminine. I believe it’s a sign that Plume, this literary initiative from the Land of Enchantment, will take its readers and writers back to the deeply needed magic and sensitivity of the feminine Moon. If you did bear with me, I will proceed with my translations of the song. A she-translator from the past asked me to do so, but let’s go by parts, like Isis the Goddess must have said when she gathered the scattered pieces of her beloved Osiris! Or maybe it was Coyolxāuhqui, goddess of the Mexicas, whose name means “the one adorned with bells or rattles”. Myth has it that her body was scattered into parts. Her brother Huitzilopochtli killed her since she allegedly threatened to kill their mother Coatlicue for bringing forth the impostor or bastard “baby” Huitzilopochtli… Before it happens, Huitzilopochtli, the Sun / Fire God of War, already born in his adult form, beheads his sister with a xiuhcoatl, a weapon embodied by his spirit animal, the turquoise (or fire) serpent. Huitzilopochtli then throws Coyolxāuhqui’s body from the mountain where Coatlicue had given birth to him. At the foot of the mountain lie the scattered body parts of the sister whose limbs are pointing in the four directions. Huitzilopochtli tosses Coyolxāuhqui’s head in the sky, where it became the moon. Should I mention that Coatlicue became pregnant after a ball of plumes fell from the sky to gift her with her last offspring?
At first I was not too fond of this particularly violent, fratricide story. Now I believe that without it none of us would be here, since I see it as a metaphoric way to explain the chaos of the Big Bang and the time when a moonless Earth became the Earth we know today, with two luminaries of day and night shining on Her… So here come the translations of my morning song and its tribute to the moon.
Why do I offer two different English versions? I guess it’s one of the things that make some non-translators see bilingual people in the same light (or lume…) as bifid beings “who speak with a forked tongue like venomous snakes”. Maybe this is why they are so eager and prompt to call translators traitors. At the School for Translators and Interpreters where I was trained in Belgium, one of the first foreign sayings we learned was the famous Italian phrase whose phonetic proximity resembles that of lume and lune: “Traduttore Traditore” (translator traitor). Here, in the same way as an “m” turns into an “n” for “light” to become “moon”, a translator’s “u” becomes a traitor’s “i”… “You” and “I”, me in your eye, ¡Ay! All is a matter of perception, assumptions, projections and personal interactions. Real translators cannot translate word for word. Literal translations epitomize poor literary quality, as illustrated in the second column by the lack of rhyme colors and the randomness of the number of syllables. Literal translations often lead to poor communication. Translating means being creative, and more than once such creativity was thrown in a translator’s face. Translators must slip their ‘snake selves’ under the skin of the speaker, in order to feel the intentions beyond words, hence the name “interpreter” usually used for oral, live translations. Some people’s intentions are crystal clear, while others are quite cryptic or intentionally deceptive. Can one really think that a misunderstanding stemming from a speaker’s cryptic or fallacious message is a translator’s fault, or the sign of a ‘treacherous’ nature? Another reason for calling translators traitors might be whose words they translate, but do they always have a choice? Translators mustn’t “pick sides”, because, precisely, their function is to make both ends or sides meet, in their quality of human bridges. Does “This Bridge Called My Back” by feminist Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa ring a [Coyolxāuhqui] bell? I owe the present writing piece to the spirit of a lady considered a mother on the north side of the border between the US and Mexico, in contrast with her figure on the south side of the border: the traitor/whore character she inherited from Mexican patriarchy. This border today, if seen from the moon, shows its true face: the trace of a beheading. Can you see, on the map of America, the humanoid shape that lost its Northern head once the border cut its throat? You will appreciate, on this illustration by Matías de Stefano, the outstanding position of New Mexico as the very head of the giant earth being!!
“My” she-translator from the past was born in the area of the “hip bone”, the root chakra and pelvic area where babies are formed and where Mexican Indigenous doulas see a butterfly. Maybe a cloud of Monarch butterflies took her in their migrating flight across the border to land one morning in my dream because she wanted to finally heal the cut over the throat chakra of the being beheaded by a border ax. In her lifetime, she was better known as “la lengua”, the tongue. Tired of piercing that tongue with the dry grass from which she was given her Indigenous name, she chose to abandon her century-long penance and emerge from the mist of History. She did it through the third eye of the giant being, during a creative writing session held on October 31st, 2016, in the hope of finding someone who would listen to what she had to say about part of Herstory.
(to be continued)