From 'i-juca piranha'

Notes

This long poem is being translated in sections, so the first note below is from Helen Bowell who was the facilitator at our first workshop looking at the poem where we tarnlated the first 26 lines down to 'i remember her saying that.'

The second note below is from Chrissy Williams, who facilitated our second workshop on this poem where we translated the next section, from lines 27 to 37.

First workshop

It was so rewarding to spend time with this powerful seven-page poem by Brazilian writer, activist and filmmaker Érica Zingano. In plain-speaking, musical poetry, Zingano thinks about the role of language-learning in the violent colonisation of Brazil. The poem begins with two antiquated dictionary definitions of ‘piranha’ (literally ‘sharp-toothed fish’), a word which comes from the indigenous language Tupi. As Zingano tells us later in the poem, when early colonisers started to learn Tupi, they wrote textbooks where the example Tupi verb was not what you’d learn at the start of a language textbook today (‘to eat’ or ‘to go’ perhaps) but juca – to kill. The title, ‘i-juca piranha’, which the group agreed should remain in Tupi, is a play on a famous poem by Gonçalves Dias, written as part of a nineteenth century literary movement called ‘indianismo’ that fetishizes the indigenous peoples of Brazil. Through the poem, Zingano critiques these colonial poets and textbook-writers, using a detached tone and powerful repetition that you can see the beginnings of in this opening stanza.

Despite its difficult theme, the poem is discursive and chatty, and our translator Francisco Vilhena was keen that we bring out the poem’s rhythm, its cigarette-in-the-hand kind of story-telling, its ironic changes in register. I hope we’ve done the first stanza justice, and whenever this poem finds its publication, I urge you to seek it out in full.

Helen Bowell, Workshop facilitator

Second workshop

The first portion of this poem had already been translated by a previous workshop, so we began by reading that back, and then diving into the rest. Much of the guide translation felt like it related very straightforwardly and directly to the original text, so we did not find ourselves straying too far away from it. The poem plays with different formal, administrative registers of language, and what they are used to mask, so words like “historicity” and “efficacious”, which initially felt a little unpoetic, we quickly realised needed to be retained precisely in order to mock their own existence. We had someone in the workshop with an intimate knowledge of academic jargon, so were able to easily translate “tocada de modo autogestionado” into the nauseatingly bureaucratic: “convened in self-access mode”. As a poem fundamentally about the erasure of indigenous language by colonisation, we were keen to keep these contrasts in register, so that the lines would retain their power, for example in: “so that they would learn / in the most efficient and efficacious manner / the language of those / they were about to kill.“ We all looked forward to seeing more of this long poem translated in the future.

Chrissy Williams, Workshop facilitator