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Note on the Translations
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems draws from Mikeas Sánchez’s six published collections. All were originally published in bilingual Zoque-Spanish editions between 2006 and 2019, five in Mexico and one in Puerto Rico, the first when Sánchez was twenty-seven. She drafted her earliest poems, those in Tumjama maka mujsi’ / Y sabrás un día (And One Day You Will Know), in Spanish, the language of her formal education, and later rendered them in Zoque. Subsequent works were either composed simultaneously in both languages or fully composed in Zoque and then self-translated into Spanish. Like most bilingual Indigenous poets in Mexico, Sánchez translates her own Zoque poems into Spanish because of the dearth of Zoque-Spanish literary translators. Even the standardization of Zoque as a written language remains in process. Indeed, Sánchez’s body of literature has played a significant role in that standardization. This volume is the first published in any country to update the Zoque orthography of her earlier poems to reflect the most current conventions.
By the time Sánchez published her second book, Mumure’ tä’ yäjktambä / Todos somos cimarrones (We’re All Maroons), she had begun composing her poetry simultaneously in both Zoque and Spanish. Many of the poems in this book are set in Barcelona, Spain, where she earned a master’s in language education as a Ford Foundation fellow. These poems draw comparisons between the lives of the African migrants she encountered in Spain and Indigenous Latin American migrants in the United States. While at first glance the book’s title might seem metaphorical, or perhaps hyperbolic, over 200,000 enslaved Africans had been forcibly transported to Mexico by 1827, when the institution of slavery was formally abolished in the United States. Much of Chiapas’s Indigenous population was trapped in peonage until the early twentieth century. Sánchez’s own ancestors—as recently as her great-grandparents—were forced into labor at the hacienda in her home community, Ajway. In a powerful reversal, the buildings of that old hacienda now serve as the first (and only) high school in Ajway—where Sánchez’s daughter studies.
Because of their subject matter, which often speaks to the universality of displacement and oppression of the marginalized, and setting, whether in Barcelona (where she lived during graduate school) or New York City, Sánchez calls the poems from We’re All Maroons (2012) her “non-Indigenous poems.” As she explains, “At that time only writing about certain themes was considered Indigenous literature.” Sánchez’s work has helped subvert that idea. One thread running through her body of work is an insistence on women’s voices in all matters of political, spiritual, artistic, and intellectual life. This, too, is part of her poetry’s subversive power. As she explains, in traditional Zoque culture “all activities related to wisdom are assigned to men. Women can’t participate.”
For the last decade, which includes the publication of Mojk’jäyä / Mokaya (Mokaya) and Jujtzye tä wäpä tzamapänh’ajä / Cómo ser un buen salvaje (How to Be a Good Savage), Sánchez has written her poems first in Zoque, then rendered them in Spanish. The process of self-translation served an editorial function as well, as it often demanded that she tinker with one version or the other until she felt fully satisfied with both. As Zoque assumed primacy, her poems began to feature Zoque cosmology, history, and myth more directly. Earlier poems refer to common Zoque beliefs about, for example, the ominous mushrooms and black moths, whose appearance portends death. Her later poems explicitly foreground Zoque cosmology, with frequent appearances of key deities like Pyokpatzyuwe, the Goddess of Time, and of El Chichón, the volcano that rises over Ajway. El Chichón, known as Tzitzunhgätzüjk in Zoque, has indelibly marked every aspect of life in Sánchez’s home community. It erupted in 1982, when Sánchez was a baby. Nine Zoque villages were destroyed and nearly two thousand people lost their lives. It was the deadliest natural disaster of the twentieth century in Mexico. The eruption left Sánchez’s family homeless. They moved to the town of Ajway and built the house where her mother and one of her sisters still live. Sánchez lives next door. In day-to-day conversation, Ajway residents still locate events in time by noting whether they were “before” or “after,” referring to the 1982 eruption.
Translating from two parallel but distinct versions of a single poem poses unique challenges—primarily, which version to prioritize when they diverge more than the single English version can bear—as well as opportunities for insight into how each language works to achieve the poet’s intended effect. We devoted significant time to deciding how to render the Zoque names of gods, deities, and ancestors. In many of her Spanish-language poems, Sánchez chose to leave the names in Zoque, often including explanatory footnotes. For this trilingual edition, the three of us decided to eliminate those footnotes and incorporate that information into endnotes. Sánchez explains that she sometimes retained the Zoque name simply because she couldn’t find a Spanish translation that pleased her. In other cases, she specifically wanted the Zoque name in the Spanish version of the poem. As she says, “We want to bring a bit of this world to English readers so that they might understand it. We want to share a few of our most important [entities] with them.”
The three of us chose to begin this volume with poems from Sánchez’s 2013 collection Mojk’jäyä / Mokaya, as they help ground readers in Zoque cosmology and belief systems as well as Sánchez’s feminist poetic voice. Selections from the other books appear in the order in which they were published. These poems show us Sánchez’s creative development over fifteen years, as she studies in Spain, where her daughter was born; returns to Mexico, lives in the city as a single parent and works as a bilingual Zoque-Spanish radio producer; and then moves back to her community in Ajway to (thus far successfully) fight against various industrial development pressures—including oil fracking.
Zoque forms one branch of the larger Mixe-Zoquean family of Indigenous languages of southern Mexico. According to Mexican government’s 2020 language census, there are just over one hundred and ten thousand speakers across seven Zoque languages, several of which are not mutually intelligible. The Zoque people have sustained their language in spite of nearly five centuries of genocidal policies, which is a triumph. Sánchez writes in the Copainalá variant of Chiapas Zoque—though she often uses words from other Zoque variants in her poems. Copainalá Zoque has an estimated fifteen thousand speakers and is considered endangered due to a rapid language shift to Spanish. While rich in oral tradition, Zoque has not commonly been used as a medium for written literature. Sánchez stands out as both a trailblazer in that emerging tradition—as the first woman to publish a book of poetry in her language—and as a champion of protecting, preserving, and strengthening the Zoque language. As Sánchez explains, “To be an Indigenous writer in Mexico is an act of protest, an act of cultural and linguistic resistance, and also a battle against the Mexican educational system and against Mexico’s literary elites.”
In addition to Sánchez’s vocation as a poet, she worked for seven years as a radio producer for the multilingual radio station XECOPA, which broadcasts in both Zoque and Tsotsil alongside Spanish, playing an important role in the continued use and mainstream visibility of those Indigenous languages. She currently works as a Zoque-Spanish translator and developer of Zoque-language curricula for elementary schools. Sánchez weaves together poetry and activism in every aspect of her creative and community life. She is a cofounder of ZODEVITE, a Zoque land-defense organization. The name is an acronym for the group’s full name in Spanish, which translates as Faith-Based Zoque Community Defending Life and Earth. ZODEVITE is, against all odds, successfully opposing mining, oil fracking, hydroelectric damming, and other large-scale threats to traditional Zoque lands. Some of Sánchez’s poems, including several in this volume, serve as antifracking anthems in Chiapas and elsewhere, appearing on banners at marches and on the walls of village buildings. In 2017, ZODEVITE won Pax Christi’s global peace prize, the first time a Mexican organization had received this award. Sánchez was chosen by ZODEVITE as their representative to accept the prize in Rome.
We have been fortunate to count Mikeas as a close—and essential—collaborator in the translation of this book. As neither of us speaks or reads Zoque, we relied on Sánchez’s own Spanish versions to make our initial translations. We later worked closely with the poet herself to understand how the two versions of each poem diverge, and why. In most instances, we have prioritized the Zoque original over the Spanish version. To give just one example: in the poem “We Are Mokayas,” the final line in the Spanish poem reads “we will give you the secret to infinite beauty,” while the Zoque reads “secret to infinite wisdom.” In English, we chose “secret to the sublime.”
We began working together on this book in 2020. Shook had previously translated most of the poems that appear here from Sánchez’s first four books as well as the first three poems from Mojk’jäyä / Mokaya. Wendy translated several additional early poems, the other twenty-two poems from that 2013 book, and the poems from Sánchez’s most recent (2019) collection, Jujtzye tä wäpä tzamapänh’ajä / Cómo ser un buen salvaje. Our translation process entailed several rounds of passing the poems back and forth, to revise and polish them. Our goal was to ensure that Sánchez’s voice rang true in English, even as our translations chart her evolution as a poet. In October 2021, after our plans to visit Sánchez in Ajway were cancelled by the pandemic, the three of us met in the Oaxaca City to review and discuss our translations. We reviewed each poem line by line, observing the differences between the Zoque and Spanish versions. During those two days, several video calls, and countless emails and messages, Sánchez offered us an intensive education in Ajway history, culture, language, and belief systems—all with endless generosity and patience. Sánchez also recorded the Zoque originals in her voice, helping us bring some measure of the orality of the original into the English. In October 2022, as we finalized this collection, Wendy was able to visit Ajway briefly, to see and hear and experience the place where many of these poems were born.
Sánchez says of her chosen mode of expression, “Not only is poetry important for sharing and understanding our people’s beliefs, it is also important as an act of resistance, to denounce all the injustices that we are subjected to as Indigenous peoples.” She believes her poetry comes not from herself alone, but from the Zoque community as a whole.
She refers to the words—las palabras—of her poems as the “sole inheritance of [her] lineage” in the fifth poem that appears in this book. References to “la palabra” appear over and over in her poems. “The word” has religious overtones—as it does in English—but it can also refer to all knowledge, the sacred path, or one’s reason for being. As Sánchez says, “I think this poetry is also a type of spell. It is a way to invoke our ancestors and be born again with them.” We are grateful that Sánchez has chosen to share her words with us and with you.
