This blog represents the collaborative work of a group of students at California State University, Chico in a Spanish course titled Indigenous Literature and Translation (SPAN 455) with Prof. Hannah Burdette in Fall 2022. Over the course of the semester we have read poetry by different authors throughout the Americas who write in their Native languages as well as in Spanish. Then we focused on translating twenty-one poems by Negma Coy, some of which you can read here on this page. Coy writes and publishes in both Spanish and Kaqchikel Maya, which means that bilingualism and translation are an integral part of her poetry to begin with. The Kaqchikel and Spanish versions of the poems you can read here are both Negma’s; the English-language versions are our translations from the Spanish.

All of the students in this class are Hispanic and bilingual. They have had to translate their entire lives, first for parents and teachers and much later in their jobs and daily lives. But never before had they attempted to translate poetry, which comes with a unique set of challenges and opportunities. We are not and do not aspire to be professional translators of poetry, but we have learned a lot in the process of translating: to inhabit the spaces between words, between worlds. Translation has invited us to confront the impossible, to struggle with difficulty, and to recognize our own limitations. Our translations are not perfect, but we hope that somehow they will also help to amplify the voice of an Indigenous author–Negma Coy–by disseminating her poetry in another language.