For my first lesson as a SOMA instructor, we did an exercise aimed at bringing in native language resources to English writing. I started by reading poems from Nicolas Guillen’s El Gran Zoo, as well as some poems that my students in New York wrote in response, in both the original Spanish and in English. Then we worked as a class to write a similar poem, taking a non-living thing and describing it as an animal. (The students chose Gossip as their animal.) After writing a poem together in English, I asked them to write independently in one of their native languages, Tsonga or Sotho. Then I demonstrated my thought process when I translate a poem from Spanish to English, especially what I do when things don’t translate word for word, or when there are many possible translations. The last step was working together to translate their poems into English.
I had a lot of reasons for wanting to do this exercise. Though the students publish in English, they conduct most of their fieldwork in tribal languages, and it’s important to retain as much of the original nuance as possible when quoting sources. On an aesthetic level, too, translation is fertile ground for innovation in the English language. When something doesn’t quite translate, it’s tempting to revert to a cliché, but it’s much more interesting to look for a way to capture the original meaning, complete with all of its images and references. However, for students who have been taught that their English is “not as good,” cliches come with the comfort of conformity, whereas literary brazenness in a second language carries the danger of misinterpretation.
I’m also interested in providing structure for their development as Tsonga journalists. According to the students, there isn’t a single Tsonga-language newspaper in South Africa, despite Tsonga’s status as one of the country’s eleven official languages. While we are currently preparing the students to enter into the English-language market, there is also an unexplored market for Tsonga journalism. The expectation is that the students could transfer the skills they are learning in English into their native languages, but there’s a much better chance of that happening if we actively promote Tsonga writing and are able to guide their use of it as a professional language.
One of the major reasons why we haven’t worked in Tsonga yet is because none of the SOMA instructors speaks the language, so we cannot copy-edit the pieces, and our ability to aid in the writing and revision processes would be seriously limited. Rather than view this as a barrier, I see it as a phenomenal opportunity for transferring a lot of responsibility to the group (another reason why the classroom is a great setting to begin this process).
As a teacher, it was a new experience to lead a writing workshop in a language I don’t speak. I liked the dynamic a lot, because it emphasized the importance of their expertise, as they debated the best way to explain to us the meaning in English of each untranslatable line. The students were critical of each other’s translations and held each other accountable, challenging the authors to explain what they really meant with each verse. For me, this meant stepping back a lot, and watching them argue in a language I can’t even parse. I was there only to bounce back my understanding and offer ways to approach the translation.
My hope is that the students will find some way to make their voices heard, in any language, and turn a profit doing it. Asked how Issue 01 of The Amazwi Villager went over, Siphiwe said that “the stories were about local people, and written by us, so they were interested, but they couldn’t believe it was so thin. There is so much happening in the villages!”
