Mother’s Joy
Notes
Quechua is an ancient indigenous language family spoken in the Andean region, including Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It encompasses many dialects and has its roots in the oral tradition. In fact, Quechua was originally only a spoken language until the Spanish came to Peru in 1526 and violently imposed the Roman alphabet.
Raúl Cisneros’ beautiful poem ‘Mother’s Joy’ evokes the landscapes, food and traditions of the poet’s birthplace, the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, and specifically the peasant community of Pariamarca, where Cisneros was a farmer, cattle herder, and baker.
During our translation workshop, we encountered many challenges, including how to best render an agglutinative language like Quechua, which is composed of one root word and suffixes added to express meaning, in English. One example was in the title, ‘Mamay Kusikuchkan’, where the ‘mama’ (mother) is accompanied by the suffix ‘y’, meaning mine. We discussed the many variations of the word ‘happiness’ in Quechua, and we settled for ‘Mother’s Joy’, as we thought it evoked a better sense of delight and pleasure expressed throughout the poem and gave the title a more universal meaning.
We also decided to leave some words in Quechua, emphasising the specificity of language in this particular poem and a distinctive sense of time and space. A family gathering with traditional food and drinks to celebrate the return of the mother’s children was rendered as a ‘mikuna pampa’, while the various multicoloured tubers of the region were left as papakuna, ulloku, maswa, uqa, with their vivid sounds and powerful rhythms. The cooking fire or hearth where women traditionally prepare their meals in Peru was left as the ‘tullpa fire’.
The poem begins with a domestic scene in a house in the Peruvian countryside and ends with a cosmological mother connecting, through chewing coca leaves and smoking astral cigars, the soil, fruits, plants and her whole existence, with a much bigger universe through a multiplicity of times.
— Leo Boix- Poet and Facilitator