Honoring Native Tongues

4/10/2008 12:00:33 PM | by Nancy Allison | PRINT VERSION | PDF VERSION

It’s not every day you’re asked to dance your way around town wearing a roasted pig’s head on your noggin.

 But if it happens during the Pol K’ek’en festival in the Yucatán, and the pig’s head is on a platter adorned with streamers and flowers and dolls and the whole town is dancing along with you and the platter has been solemnly passed to you by an elder whose job it’s been to bear the offering each year at the festival since time out of mind, then you are no longer on the outside of the circle. Brother, you’re in.

In fact, says Donald Frischmann, professor of Spanish at TCU, you’ve just been made an honorary Mayan.

Frischmann should know. His connections to indigenous cultures in Mexico go back to the ’70s, when he began studying the native language of Nahuatl. He’s been learning and writing about indigenous languages and traditions ever since.

In 2007, Frischmann and Mexican linguist and writer, Carlos Montemayor, completed Words of the True Peoples/Palabras de los Seres Verdaderos. The three-volume critical anthology of prose, poetry and plays showcasing 33 indigenous writers and the 13 languages they write in took nearly a decade to translate and edit.

But it seems that Frischmann just can’t stop dancing. A tri-lingual compilation of the three volumes, updated and translated into Mayan, launches this spring in Mexico. This summer, he leads a study trip on language and culture in the Yucatán.

Frischmann’s aim, as always: to deserve the part he was given, and to honor the indigenous languages, art, people and traditions he has come to love.

Entranced by a culture

You say tomato; I say tomato, but I’ll bet you don’t know that the word comes from Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs. The Nahuatl would have said xitomatl like this: shi-TO-matl. In fact, they still do.

Nahuatl (pronounced NAH-watt) is the most widely spoken of the 62 indigenous languages of Mexico that still work, live and breathe today. It sounds to some like a cross between Latin and Japanese. Many words, like xitomatl, include the letters xi, which give the language a rhythmic shish, like the sound your feet make hiking up the slant of a volcano.

“Go out by the volcano and find someone who speaks Nahuatl,” is not an assignment you’d hear in most university classrooms. Donald Frischmann, professor of Spanish, was a graduate student in an anthropology course in Mexico when he was given that task.

Mexico’s volcanoes and pyramids were part of the reason Frischmann became so fascinated by it on a 5-day trip to the country at the age of 14. Sure, he’d go out by the volcano! But would he find anybody who’d talk to him? And if they did, how would he understand what they were saying?

Frischmann, by then fluent in Spanish, did indeed locate speakers of Nahuatl near Popocatépetl, the volcano located 25 miles from Puebla. The name Popocatépetl is derived from the Nahuatl words popōca, “it smokes” and tepētl, “mountain.” The family also spoke Spanish, and easily taught Frischmann a few words of their native tongue.

In one golden afternoon, they changed his life.

To speak with the descendents of a culture that entranced him, to understand people who had such faith in their language that they had guarded it through 500 years of denigration, acculturation, opposition and murder, was a revelation to the young scholar of Latin American culture.

The experience would haunt him through years of graduate school. Nahuatl would become an obsession, like a lover whose secrets he had to unfold. He hung onto his desire for years, visiting Mexico and practicing Nahuatl, reading all that he could about the native peoples of America.

Frankly, he was disappointed that the literature he was assigned in grad school about indigenous peoples was always in Spanish. His obsession quietly propelled him to explore other native languages, to keep visiting Mexico, and to research, document and discuss the rituals and writings, he says, “of people who have traditionally remained unknown.” While anthropologists have uncovered much about the oral traditions of the indigenous people of Mexico, “five centuries of racial and cultural prejudice has had much to do with the literary academy’s neglect of their verbal creations,” Frischmann says.

To help redress that neglect, Frischmann put all of his knowledge and passion to bear on it. From 2000-2001, during a Senior Fulbright Award to Universidad de las Américas, he completed the manuscript for Words of the True Peoples/Palabras de los Seres Verdaderos, the first volume of a multi-lingual anthology of contemporary indigenous Mexican writing.

In February 2007, Frischmann returned for the third time to the renowned Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City to present the final volume of Words of the True Peoples to the public. The collection encompasses the 13 native languages of its 33 poets, dramatists and prose writers: Nahuatl, Maya, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Tabasco Chontal, Purepecha, Sierra Zapoteco, Isthmus Zapoteco, Mazateco, Ñahñu, Totonaco, and Huichol.

Each of the three volumes includes introductory essays by Frischmann and co-editor, Carlos Montemayor, as well as short biographies of each author and work in the indigenous language in which it was originally composed. Spanish and English translations follow, as well as careful footnotes explaining cultural, linguistic, and historical allusions.

The books are illustrated with riveting black and white portraits by photographer George O. Jackson. Jackson, well known for his photographs documenting Mexican indigenous folk culture, was shooting his own book about the essence of the Mexican festival when Frischmann contacted him. The two men traveled 4,000 miles of dusty back roads in three weeks, to capture each writer’s image on film.

“I will always remember the camaraderie that existed between Don and the writers,” says Jackson. “Aside from being known as the authority on indigenous Mexican theater, The Words of the True Peoples is a testimony to Don’s commitment. His dedication to indigenous writings and culture is apparent.”

The translator is a special kind of bridge, connecting people, lives, worlds. Frischmann felt it was important to explain many of the culture-specific references that the authors often neglected to include in their own Spanish-language translations.

“Where those translations seemed vague, I sat down with the poets and examined their compositions line by line to ‘recover’ important textual elements,” he says.

Thanks to his tenacity, Frischmann’s translations are sometimes more complete than the writers’ Spanish versions themselves: linguistic bridges made even stronger in the hope of bringing more readers across.

The Spanish conquerors didn’t want bridges. They wanted a rout. Natives were killed, Mayan books were burned and indigenous languages systematically forbidden. “In Mexico the Spanish language has been, until just recently, the exclusive language of schooling,” Frischmann explains.

It’s estimated that when the Spanish arrived, 5 million people in Mexico and Central America spoke 300 different languages. Today, there are approximately 10 million indigenous Mexicans. Nahuatl (spoken by about 2.5 million people) and the Mayan tongues (native to about 1.5 million people) are the most widely spoken of the 62 remaining languages in Mexico.

Even fewer write in their native tongue. But, says Frischmann, “The heated debate over the true meaning of the Columbus Quincentennary in 1992 spurred a national indigenous movement in Mexico, uniting writers in many languages who had previously worked in isolation.”

And so the hidden writers of Mexico began to appear to one another. Yet it’s safe to say that Words of the True Peoples is the first collection to introduce Nahuatl, Maya, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Tabasco Chontal, Purepecha, Sierra Zapoteco, Isthmus Zapoteco, Mazateco, Ñahñu, Totonaco, and Huichol writing to the wider world.

In Volume One, Purphepecha writer Joel Torres Sánchez writes about a healer who lived in his village when he was a boy. He writes her story so, “those who know nothing of her existence will realize that señora lived.”

Asked if that story mirrors Frischmann’s intent in publishing the book, he replies, “Exactly! Our hope is to reveal to the Western societies with which our peoples coexist, the long-marginalized, innermost feelings, needs, and worldviews of Mexico’s ten to twenty million indigenous peoples.”

Thanks to such attention to detail, and to the introductory essays that Frischmann and Montemayor wrote for each volume, cultural anthropologist Anya Peterson Royce calls the anthology, “a monumental contribution to the world of indigenous language literatures.” Aware of no other work “of its kind and scope,” Royce praises Words of the True Peoples as, “a model of linguistic sophistication that will set the standard for anyone working in indigenous literatures for a long time to come.”

But Frischmann isn’t finished yet. This spring, “an abundantly annotated, trilingual (Mayan, Spanish, English) anthology of contemporary Yucatec Mayan writers” will be published in Mexico. New Songs of the Ceiba, prepared for the Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán, includes work by eight of the writers featured in Words of the True Peoples.

Mayan poet Wildernain Villegas Carrillo was so struck by Frischmann’s attention to detail when they worked together on Words, that he has asked Frischmann to translate his 2008 prize-winning book of poems into English. “To interview me,” says Carrillo, Frischmann came all the way to Chetumal, which for most people is the end of the earth. His dedication to this field is without comparison.”

Frischmann, in love for more than 30 years with the native languages of Mexico, reveals his dedication in the classroom, too. This semester he offers his senior seminar students a rare chance to study Carrillo’s yet unpublished, award-winning book of poetry, as well as the works of other authors “who have won the national Nezahualcóyotl Prize for Indigenous-Language Literatures.”

Recently, Frischmann presented the Words of the True Peoples collection in Mérida, Yucatán. On stage with him were six mature Mayan writers. It’s a legacy of indigenous oppression that Frischmann, a white, Spanish speaking, North American academic, introduced the writers and their work to the diverse audience at this gala event.

In the front row sat representatives from all of Mexico’s cultural institutes. Among them, was one man who has, “systematically denied the value of indigenous writing,” says Frischmann, and who has worked hard for years “to keep Maya from being included in the state capital’s literary circles.”

However, the week after Frischmann’s appearance, one of the Mayan writers he sat “shoulder to shoulder” with on the panel was invited to be on the Yucatán State Cultural Institute’s new editorial board. The decision had finally been made to include Mayan literature among the Institute’s publications. After 500 years of exclusion, Maya is edging into the mainstream.

Says Frischmann: “I would like to believe my work and public presentations have had something to do with that.”

 Contact Frischmann at d.frischmann@tcu.edu.

Comment at tcumagazine@tcu.edu.

Don Frischmann earned his doctorate in Spanish at the University of Arizona. His areas of specialty are Mayan theatre, contemporary Mexican indigenous literature, and the culture and politics of Mexico. He is teaching intensive Spanish grammar and senior seminars in Spanish.