“Ngillatun en la Costa / Ngillatun Lafken Meu / Ngillatun at the Coast”
Download “Ngillatun en la Costa / Ngillatun Lafken Meu / Ngillatun at the Coast”
Every November since 2012, Broadsided has presented works by writers creating in languages Indigenous to the Americas–sometimes wholly, sometimes in part. This is our annual Translation feature. We partner with poets and scholars to solicit and select these poems.
Below is a note giving history, context, and story to the beautiful work in this year’s fall folio, in which editor Inés Hernandez-Avila shares work by two poets working in Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people of Chile:
I am honored to present these two distinguished poets, Graciela Huinao, Mapuche-Williche (the Williche are Mapuche people from the south of Chile), and María Isabel Millapan, Mapuche, respected and beloved representatives of the flourishing Indigenous literature ongoing in this hemisphere known as the Americas. According to Mapuche linguist and Indigenous rights activist Elisa Loncón, the Mapuche population is about 10% of the population of Chile, a marked contrast to the population of the total of all Native Nations in the U.S., which is currently about 2%. Having resisted conquest for three centuries, until the early 1880s when they were dispossessed of almost all their ancestral lands, the Mapuche people today are a formidable, vibrant, and Indigenous-rights-activist presence in the political and intercultural life of Chile. The belief-system of the Mapuche, “people of the earth,” is the Azmapu, in which kinship with the earth, the value of good living, spiritual balance, the fervent centrality of their Word, and an infinite tenderness towards life are key principles. While their language, Mapudungun, “the language of the earth,” is considered an endangered language, there is a fervent movement of language revitalization happening in Chile, with the creative writers prominently at the forefront, some of whom like Lara Millapan, grew up knowing the language fluently. The fluent traditional speakers and elders are always recognized as their teachers, their guides.
In their literary world, Mapuche writers choose to write bilingually, in Mapudungun and Spanish, to reach wider audiences, as do so many Indigenous writers across Mexico, Central America, and South America. There is constant translation happening back-and-forth, which is one of the reasons I was so drawn to the work of Huinao and Lara Millapan. Mapuche literature has reached high levels of acclaim in Chile, and some writers have earned international distinction. A leading figure of the Mapuche literary world, Elicura Chihuailaf Nahelpán—oralitor, poet, storyteller, essayist—was awarded the National Prize in Literature, in 2020, becoming the first Mapuche poet to receive this honor. Graciela Huinao is the first Mapuche woman to have been published and the first Mapuche writer to have been inducted into the Academia Chilena de la Lengua in 2014. Many of the creative writers, poets, and novelists, are also leading scholars whose work focuses on the Mapuche people, such as Maribel Mora Curriao, Daniela Catrileo, and Lara Millapan. The poets mentioned here are part of a wide community of Mapuche poets in Chile. Because they write in Mapudungun and Spanish (and so many have been translated internationally), readers have a chance to partake of a poetic tradition that reveals a profound ancient/contemporary Mapuche world embraced in the words of these poems.
In “Pilmaikeñ weychafe,” “Golondrina Guerrera,” “Swallow Warrior Woman,” Mapuche poet María Isabel Millapan offers us a scene alive with the heart’s reach of seeing a relative, Swallow Warrior Woman, finding her nest gone on a windy, rainy day. The poem’s persona sings to the bird woman mother, urging her to keep going, because “justice has a soul.” The reciprocity between the poem’s persona and the swallow offer a tender bond emanating from the poet’s own consciousness of land dispossession. In the poem, “Ngillatun Lafken Meu,” “Ngillatun en la costa,” “Ngillatun on the coast,” Mapuche poet Graciela Huinao describes the Williche way of pausing for ceremony, to release and renew. In “unhook[ing] themselves from history,” they return to their beginnings, to protect themselves from the forces that want to overcome them, knowing that the Earth and the oceans are with them. Both poets manifest the palpable heightened love for their peoples, human and more-than-human, that rises from the deep core of their beings, and from their shared culture.
–Inés Hernandez-Avila, Translation Editor
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Graciela Huinao: Por tratarse de un medio de comunicación serio y por el apoyo cultural a escritores, poetas… (Because it is a serious media outlet and because of its cultural support for writers, poets…)
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: As someone with strong ties to the ocean, I was really draw to the idea of collective healing in community with the ocean as a living entity.
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Graciela Huinao: Por ser un reclamo histórico a la sociedad chilena de discriminación, desprecio, usurpación de nuestras tierra y cultura. (Because it is a historical demand against Chilean society for discrimination, contempt, and the usurpation of our land and culture.)
How did this image come to be?
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: The photograph is a cyanolumen on silver gelatin paper. After taking time to contemplate the poem, I gathered small rocks from the Atlantic ocean and madder roots from my dye garden located on the traditional, unceded territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy, so-called Portland, Maine. The roots were exposed under the sun for a few hours on top of the light sensitive silver gelatin paper leaving a ghostly imprint. At a later point in time, I dipped the rocks into cyanotype solution, which is blue and reminiscent of the tidal ocean. Roots are both grounding and representative of the delicate connection between living beings. The spiral formation of the rocks symbolize the unity and continuous cycle of life, while each individual rock is a singular being in community.
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Does the artist’s response make you see the poem differently?
Poet Graciela Huinao: Cada persona o artista que lea el poema, tendrá su propia versión, dependerá de cómo anide en su corazón. (Each person or artist who reads the poem will have their own version, depending on how it resonates in their heart.)
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response?
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: The lumen print of the root pre-existed the piece. It sat in my to-be-finished-upon-inspiration pile. The poem sparked the inspiration and connection that I needed to finish the piece.
What question would you like to ask your collaborator?
Poet to Artist: De qué color es su espíritu? (What color is your spirit?)
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: I feel most embodied by red ochre. It’s the color I associate with the earth and the dry, heat of the climate where I feel most at home.
Artist to Poet: How do you choose which words are translated to english and which are not? This is also a technique that I have engaged using Quechua, but have not seen much.
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue (see the “related broadsides” links on the left), what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Poet Graciela Huinao: Que es plausible la mirada y oportunidad que le dan a los pueblos originarios, es una tremenda ventana cultural que se abre a nuestros escritos. (The perspective and opportunity given to indigenous peoples is commendable; it is a tremendous cultural window that opens up to our writings.)
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: Kinship seems like an overriding connection for the work in this issue, which is always at the forefront of my mind.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Graciela Huinao: En un mundo sin barreras ideológicas, ya sean políticas o religiosas, dónde solo la libertad sea una bandera. (In a world without ideological barriers, whether political or religious, where only freedom is a banner.)
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: It would be fun to see the broadside posted on a sturdy cotton paper outdoors and then watch how it returns to the earth over time, but then I love a performative object.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Graciela Huinao: Templado.
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: It feels like late summer, when the evenings start to cool down, but the days are still warm and sunny.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Poet Graciela Huinao: En un encuentro de poetas en lengua originaria de todo el mundo. (At a gathering of poets writing in indigenous languages from around the world.)
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: My work is very environmentally specific, so I like to draw from whatever is directly in the vicinity as a prompt when leading workshops.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Graciela Huinao: Varios.
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: The Spirit of the Rainforest by Dr. Rosa Vásquez Espinoza
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Graciela Huinao: Sí.
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: Rashid Johnson’s major solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, A Poem for Deep Thinkers.
How does translation fit into your creative life as an artist? How does work from other cultures and traditions influence your art?
Artist Rosalba Breazeale: For myself, being a visual artist is synonymous with storytelling. When I create, I am actively synthesizing and translating history and cultural heritage into a physical form. My work always comes out of my own ancestral and experienced culture and traditions, but I am always looking for places where those align or intersect with creatives from other mediums and backgrounds. Having worked on a lot of collaborations over the past few years, it’s important to be open to learning from and working with other people’s experiences. Collaboration is great! Appropriation is not.