poems by sor juana ines de la cruz who took cornell

Yes, I grew up in Emiliano Zapata, Tumbalá, Chiapas and moved to San Cristóbal de las Casas after high school, where I received a diplomado in creación literaria from the Escuela de Escritores de México. I am so happy that we are doing this interview in Ch’ol. Juana Peñate Montejo: Thank you for coming. Is this where you grew up and have always lived? I want to begin by asking you about your beginnings. This is the first time Peñate Montejo’s poetry has appeared in English, translated directly from the Ch’ol.Ĭarol Rose Little: It is good to be with you here in Chiapas, in Tumbalá. She has authored several books of poetry in Ch’ol with self-translations in Spanish including Mi nombre ya no es silencio (CONECULTA 2002), Ipusik’al Matye’lum/Heart of a Wild Land, first published by Pluralia in 2013, and most recently Isoñil Ja’al/Dance of the Rain, which won the 2020 Premio de Literaturas Indígenas de América and will be published this year by the University of Guadalajara, as well as Tsa’ Kñajle…Jump’ej K’iñ, Jump’ej K’iñ…/One Day, One Day…I Dreamed… to be co-published this year by Oralibrura and Lakñichimal.Ĭh’ol, or lakty’añ as it is known by speakers, is a Mayan language spoken by a quarter of a million people in southern Mexico and diaspora communities in the United States. Juana Peñate Montejo (previously published as Juana Karen), a lawyer by training, is a Ch’ol poet, writer, translator, and educator and cultural promoter from Emiliano Zapata, Tumbalá, Chiapas, Mexico. While only two sat at the table-puzzling, imagining, trying and retrying words and phrases-it was as if Peñate Montejo was there, too. A deep familiarity and intimate knowledge of Ch’ol culture, as well as of the language, proved indispensable. Each word and poem were labored over, always preserving the number of lines in the original and, as much as possible, the poem’s appearance on the page. The wildly different soundscape and linguistic structure of the Ch’ol language made a certain level of compromise immediately evident. The starting point was always a careful, word by word, literal translation of each poem, from Ch’ol to English. On a practical level, very different skill sets, that of a linguist and a poet, complemented each other. One might think that the added complexity of co-translation would make a difficult task near impossible. Translation of poetry is a curious art, a dance between the poles of exactitude and compromise. Our desires and dreams are called up in poems that are resonant, powerful, and refreshingly new. Her words are rooted in the beliefs of her Ch’ol ancestors but also in her experiences living in contemporary Mexico, creating a productive friction, sensual and tender in one moment, fierce in the next. Peñate Montejo’s authoritative voice, embodied and unhesitatingly female, captures her lived struggles-to find voice as a poet, to be a woman, to hold memory and peoplehood. These poems, written in Ch’ol, translated by Peñate Montejo into Spanish, and now, for the first time, translated from Ch’ol into English, lodge in the reader’s heart and gut. Her poems evoke the verdant land that surrounds her home in Tumbalá-its rivers and mountains, storms and vegetation.

To read Juana Peñate Montejo’s poetry is to be immersed in the rich and vibrant natural world of Chiapas, Mexico.

Poems by sor juana ines de la cruz who took cornell