On my morning walks to spinning class with neighbor Juan, we usually discuss the San Cristóbal sunrise, his progress on his thesis, and wind up talking about movies. (My vocabulary, as you can tell, limits me to certain topics.) A few weeks ago, while we joked about dubbed movies, I tried to recall the scene in Lost in Translation that makes fun of Japanese dubbing. I attempted to translate the title as "Perdido en Traduccion"; Juan said he'd never heard of it. After I described it in further detail, he suddenly realized that he had in fact seen the movie. The confusion was rooted in my literal translation of the title; the Spanish title, ironically, had been changed to "Perdido en Japon", "Lost in Japan".

Over the past six weeks, the subtle and, at other times much more blatant discrepancies in words and meaning have arisen during my morning walks, throughout my day at work, and usually a few times during my evening Spanish classes. My personal favorite was a ten-minute conversation during which my Spanish teacher was arguing against the death penalty and I was debating euthanasia. Needless to say, some of what is lost in translation can be written off as simple but grave miscommunications.

Since my arrival at the Peace House, I have been working five days a weeks at Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMMA), an indigenous women's group founded in 1994 that works to promote women's theatre arts and bilingual literacy. I've been dedicated to a variety of tasks, from costume design to grant research, but have mainly focused on the organization's literature archive. Along with Mimi Laughlin, who has worked with FOMMA since its founding, I have been typing and organizing the ten years of autobiographies, poetry and folktales that the women of FOMMA have written.

The work is fascinating, not only from a literary perspective, but also for its cultural and linguistic implications. All of the pieces I am organizing were originally written in indigenous languages and have since been translated into Spanish. Margarita and Emma, two girls my own age who work at FOMMA, are currently translating a large backlog of pieces from Tzotzil and Tzeltal respectively, in an effort to make the work of indigenous women available to the much wider Spanish speaking audience. We have hopes of eventually publishing some of the pieces in an anthology of indigenous women's tales--a type of book that has yet to exist, amidst a handful of compilations of indigenous men's tales.

While reading, typing and organizing the stories, I have many times taken pause to think about the process I am participating in. With many of the pieces I read, I wonder what has been lost in translation, so to speak; what role, for instance, the women translating take in actually rewriting the stories, what role I might potentially take in simple grammatical editing of those translations, what role the eventual audience will take in reading and analyzing them in their new form. The filters through which the original Tzotzil and Tzeltal words must pass complicate the content of the stories and moreover, the act of writing itself. There seems to me to be some ethical dilemma--an unspoken and certainly subjective one--to what we are doing. I have tried to critically analyze the process, to search for some means of making the translations more precise, less invasive to the original stories themselves, and to figure out the turning point at which the tone of the translation ceases to resonate with the texture of the original work.

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But in some ways, this is the problematic nature of translation across literature, across spoken languages, across words themselves. Octavio Paz recalls in the first chapter of A Labyrinth of Solitude, his fellow immigrant's struggle to reconcile language barriers: "Yes it's very lovely, but I don't belong here [the US]. Even the birds speak English. How can I enjoy a flower if I don't know its right name, its English name, the name that has fused with its colors and petals, the name that's the same thing as the flower?" Are the original Tzotzil and Tzeltal words with which the women of FOMMA are recounting their stories, the only ones that can capture the essence behind those stories? I struggle with the idea that the pieces I am typing have been diluted by the translation process, that the words I am reading are dissociated rather than "fused" with the colors, the essentials, of the stories they tell.

At a gathering of the becarios, the Mayan scholarship students who teach bilingual literacy classes at FOMMA every Saturday, a student visiting from D.F. presented two poems she had written, both in Tzotzil and Spanish. Afterwards, another student asked if she translated her work verbatim. The writer explained that she did not, she could not translate directly from Tzotzil to Spanish and still retain the emotion she was trying to convey. Instead she altars words in order speak to Tzotzil or Spanish readers respectively. Another woman at the gathering, an American doing research on indigenous literature, had pointed out to me earlier some of the obstacles of translation; for example, there is no Tzotzil word for "window", and a window would instead be described as "the eyes of a house." I recalled the more or less literal translations I was helping to organize, and wondered about the nature of the words in their purist forms. Perhaps, like Paz's friends, a Spanish reader cannot truly "belong" to a translated story, because he cannot experience the original Tzotzil or Tzeltal text first hand. In translation, words that were originally saturated with meaning, can become thin, less emotional or evocative, less true to the writer herself.

However I justify, and moreover, value my work with the thought that eventually FOMMA's stories will be available to readers everywhere, and that even stripped of their purist original form, the tales and poems provide remarkable insight into indigenous women's lives. They are also true examples of how art reflects life, and active examples of how words--even removed by a few degrees--can make indigenous artistic sensibilities accessible to a variety of readers. While we can perhaps only experience a partial telling of the stories, these slivers still give names to experiences that should be told. Perhaps as readers, it is our responsibility to acknowledge what may fall away and get lost in translation, and to realize that the spaces in between the words may tell as much as the words themselves.