Found in Translation

Bejuco Daydreams
A little girl stands deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, gazing up at a
labyrinth of climbing vines. The young girl is part of the Shuar community, an
indigenous group that has lived in the jungle since pre-Incan times. And these
climbing bejuco are not just any vines. She and her friends play games using
the bejuco, climbing them like ladders up the towering trees to watch the birds
flying near the treetops. Villagers use the bejuco to build their homes, to heal,
and to decorate. The bejuco is a pathway to visit the yaa nua, the star women
who live in the sky. To this little Shuar girl, the bejuco is heavenly—beautiful
and somewhat magical. So how do you translate the word bejuco?
The answer is found in an unlikely place, thousands of miles away in a
drastically different setting—central London. Traditional black cabs whiz
through the streets. Historic buildings and subway stops provide an ongoing
exchange of commuters and students. Neon lights from restaurants,
bookstores, and shops light up the footpath. At first glance, the only thing it has
in common with the Amazon is that it’s raining. But walk into the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Arts building, head upstairs and peer into the conference
room, and you’ll soon learn why this group is well suited to find the perfect
translation.
The unlikely team includes a Finnish poet and translator with a PhD in
Swahili poetry, a former British diplomat who lived and worked in China for
many years, an Italian translator of West Indian francophone poetry, a

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physician and former editor of the British Medical Journal, a senior lecturer in
Somali and Amharic, a Canadian feminist who works as a radio producer for
the BBC, an Indian doctor and director of a Hindi publishing company, and an
award-winning British poet and veteran of poetry translation who will lead the
group to make the best possible choices. In total, there are ten people
assembled. And none is fluent in Shuar—there are only about thirty thousand
people who speak the Shuar language, and most of them live in the Ecuadorian
Amazon.
As they sit around the table, their steaming cups of English tea remain
largely untouched. The prospect in front of them is much more tantalizing. It’s
a poem—a thirteen-word poem—and their mission is to translate it into
English before the evening is over. With just thirteen words, how hard could it
be? That depends. Bejuco is just one word in the poem, but it’s an essential one.
And poetry translation is not exactly a straightforward process.
The path to rendering the poem into English started with the poet herself,
María Clara Sharupi Jua, a Shuar woman from Ecuador, who first translated
her poem from Shuar into Spanish. While Shuar is her native tongue, she’s
also perfectly fluent in Spanish and writes in both languages. Another attendee
at tonight’s meeting, a native English speaker and Spanish translator who used
to live in Ecuador, has prepared some rough translations, known as “literals,”
that the group will use as a basis for discussion. She has carefully annotated
these translations with alternate words and footnotes on cultural context. The
group has already read them in advance of tonight’s session.
The organization is known as the Poetry Translation Centre, and was
established in 2004 by the poet Sarah Maguire to translate contemporary
poetry from Africa, Asia, and Latin America and to bring these works to the
English-speaking world. Under Maguire’s supervision, the Poetry Translation
Centre has conducted workshops to translate from languages as diverse as
Assamese, Gujarati, Indonesian, Kurdish, Siraiki, Tajik, and Zapotec.
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As the session unfolds, the group discusses each word of the poem in
painstaking detail. To do so, they use the literal translation of the poem and the
Spanish version, which is read aloud at the start so everyone can hear the
music of the poem. Perhaps surprising, they have the most heated debates not
about the word bejuco but about the word delgado, which, when literally
translated, means “thin,” and is used in the poem to describe the girl’s legs.
However, the word thin does not seem to be in keeping with the spirit of this
little girl’s daydreams of power and adventure. The feminist in the group
rightly points out that thin can be associated with weakness, whereas this girl
seems to want to run and play. Eventually, the group chooses a more

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appropriate synonym, lean, instead.
So what did the group decide to do with the word bejuco? As the poet Sarah
Maguire points out, “Bejuco is a beautiful word. There’s nothing like it in
English. We don’t need to translate it. It can stand on its own.” The group nods
in unanimous agreement, reflecting on the sounds the word makes when
spoken aloud and electing to add the word vine in order to make its meaning
clear. See the results for yourself:
Dreams
By María Clara Sharupi Jua
She is five years old and daydreams
her legs are like a lean bejuco vine
The original Shuar reads: Ewej uwi takakiat, nua uchi nuyá karámeawai /
makuinkia káapia anin ayat; the literal version is She is five years old and
daydreams / that her legs resemble a thin, climbing bejuco vine.
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Where poetry translation is concerned, sometimes two, three, or ten heads
are truly better than one. Even if not all of those heads can understand the
source language, knowing the language of poetry—and having diverse
viewpoints involved in the process—is sometimes even more important.